MasterP said:
You might get away with it at $600 but it would be using older generation parts and when you wanted to upgrade again in a year or two you’d have to rebuild the whole thing again.
Actually I believed I proved this earlier statement but whatever. I still wouldn’t stand behind any build that attempted to game at this price range. It’s just a waste to spend so much money and still fall short of what’s needed to play tomorrow’s games at decent framerates.
I still stand behind my earlier statement that anything less than $800 will leave you wanting more performance with new or upcoming games and make you wish you had spent more when you try to upgrade in a year and discover you can’t without spending another $400.
Nickname: The 7600 would play L4D and CoD4 at medium. If we’re using something like Crysis as the baseline for NEW then nothing we can price him will meet that short of spending money on a NEW video card. NEW card to play NEW games, old (cheap) card to play old games. You just can’t get around the whole “get what you paid for” thing.
The 9600 I posted averages 20-30% better in benchmarks and the CPU is roughly 25% faster. Other than that I guess they’re virtually the same speed. 
The Phenom’s performance doesn’t necessarily have to make sense. Remember we’re talking about the company that had their 3-core processors outperforming their 4-core processors at the same speeds.