High Performance Gaming PC for Under $1,000

With both of my parents being computer engineers, never in my life have I bought a PC.  Why?  Because when I look at what you are getting and how much you pay for it when you get a complete computer, I realize that I'd save some money by putting together the same computer myself.  Plus I also have a wide range of choices, rather than being limited to a single set of components with maybe a little variation in processor speed, memory size, etc.  And I don't consider it much of a hassle to put together the computer; the entire process takes me less than two hours.

Below I've listed the parts to a custom gaming PC.  The prices I used are from Newegg.com.  While their prices may not ALWAYS be the best out there, they're usually all very close, so I find it to be a good estimate of what something will actually cost without doing a lot of price hunting beforehand.  Prices listed are the current prices as I write this article, after mail-in rebates but before taxes and shipping.

CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (Socket AM2)
Even on a relatively small budget, I chose to have a dual-core processor.  More and more games these days (along with other programs) are optimized for multiple cores.  Buying a dual-core processor keeps you "future-proof" for longer than a single-core CPU would.  The 3800+ is the bottom of AMD's dual-core processors, running at 2.0 GHz with 512KB of cache per core.
Price: $169.00

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-M55SLI-S4 (Socket AM2)
Since we're talking about a gaming PC, SLI is an important feature (for those of you who don't know what SLI is, it's a technology that enables a user to use multiple graphics cards in the same computer to increase performance).  This is a standard SLI-compatible motherboard, and it includes two PCI-Express x16 slots, four SATA ports and four IDE ports, two PCI slots, four DDR2 memory slots, and completely silent chipset cooling.
Price: $96.99