don't listen to these guys they don't even know what they are talking about.....except the guy who was talking about the motherboard although gigabyte worked fine for me for years with no problems....
really a 4870 will beat anything except a nvidia 280 and it cost much less.
I will say that some things on the list are optional and don't need to be bought or there may be more than one item to choose from.
also quad core is useless because almost no program utilizes all 4 cores and a dual core priced at half will over power it. Go with the amd athlon 5400+ black edition since you can easily overclock it to 3.4 ghz with no problem especially with that cpu fan (no need for a water cooled system)
black edition processors have the multiplier present so that is what makes it so easy.....I didn't want to fiddle with my old cpu trying to connect the bridges and risk it so i too bought a black edition.
note: read carefully if you decide to make different choices on parts since the build I made might not work well if you change certain things like the motherboard which has a socket type that will fit the CPU I listed.
also I will fix the links later. they are from another thread. http://www.onrpg.com/boards/104687.html