Yeah, AMD is probably your best bet.
Hehe, scary though you say you don't care about the company
Though its true, they are more the same than getting a CPU is. My personal opinion would be Nvidia now really (Not for a biased opinion...i mean look at my signiture...I have a ATI at the moment
)
Look at this first of all:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16819103537
That would be great for gaming, and is very overclockable too (can push it a bit more if you learn how, to make it run faster), plus its a rather cheap processor for such a great performer! (3000+ means it'd be as good as the 3.0Ghz Pentium 4)
The Venice core which this one is, is the newest core around, and runs with a 90nm process (the Winchester core before it did too) , and this is just the manufacturing process which is supposed to make it run cooler (always a good thing) and has a few more memory enhancements than the other cores (the order they came in: Clawhammer, Winchester, Venice),
The processor is also a 939 socket so you'll need to find a motherboard with this in mind (will have it clearly on a webpage)
As for the video card, what about this one?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814150099
Its a great card and is a budget one which will play all new games at rather high settings (at standard res's, for example 1152x864)
Though if you wanted something better than taht which would last you longer:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814130215
Then that is a great card, the 6800GT!
Cards come in standards by the way, GT being faster than Vanilla (standard), and Ultra being faster than GT.
Now these cards are both PCI-Express which is the newest format which means you'll be able to update video cards for much longer than if you had AGP on your motherboard.
I'm not that good at choosing motherboards though, but I'm sure someone can help you with that
Liking the system so far?
I hope I've helped explain things you might not have known before so its up to you for example, which video card you choose, etc