You kind of contradicted yourself here in your posts. You said you don't need a super powerful machine, but you seem to be building a tank...you don't need an i7 if you aren't encoding or editing things. A Phenom 2 will do better in gaming...and AMD build is probably quite a bit cheaper right now...so more bang for your buck (for what you are using it for). And honestly, you shouldn't have a bias against ATI...IMHO, they are you're best bang for your buck right now in the GPU category. I love nVidia and ATI, but if you aren't giving me the best for my money, I'm not going to buy something from you..that's my philosophy on that. But, it's your money. For what you are doing, if you are doing casual gaming, but want very good performance, I'd grab a single ATI 4870 or an nVidia 260 Core 216. If you want to game heavier, then maybe grab 2 of either of the above cards and do a CF or SLI setup, depending on what platform (AMD/INTEL) you choose.
My 2 cents. Oh, and wise decision on not upgrading...it would probably cost as much as half of this build to get it up to decent specs with outdated hardware.
True..true. Yeah I realized that building would be a better option.
SLI is when there dual cards working correct? but what is the CF?
and if it was your choise between AMD or INTEL what would you pick?
Also I am currently looking for a big motherboard since I want a get a full tower case. I already got a sound card and a video card hanging around, right now I am considering of buying Vista 32-bit, but there is also 64 for little more cash but since I never really used Vista because I've been always an XP geek, so how is it? In performance? I mean of course I used it for a little bit, but none of my machines are set up to Vista.