[Neatton]

Dell has a problem putting in cheap motherboards. Some years ago we got my wife a dell and I could never understand why the thing was so slow with the descent parts in it. We found out the whole thing was bottlenecked by the motherboard. In any case let me see if I can put something together. Also just so you know the tech forum is Neattons Nexus might want to drop by in that forum some good stuff.

EDIT:

Here is a list I threw together from newegg.com

Disclaimer: I am an Nvidia, Asus, and AMD fanboi take it for what it is worth it's good stuff.

Antec LifeStyle SONATA II Piano Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case 450Watt SmartPower 2.0 ATX 12V V2.0 for AMD & Intel systems Power Supply - Retail 99.00

Western Digital Caviar SE WD2500JS 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM 89.00

ASUS A8N-E Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail 92.99

eVGA 256-P2-N565-AX Geforce 7900GT 256MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16 Video Card - Retail 359.00

OCZ Premier Dual Channel 1GB (2 x 512MB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) Unbuffered System Memory Model OCZ4001024PDC-K - Retail 84.99

AMD Athlon 64 3700+ San Diego 1GHz HT Socket 939 Processor Model ADA3700BNBOX - Retail 213.00

This came out to just under 940.00 so it may be slightly over the 1k mark with shipping. My recommendations if you can squeeze that budget for a few more drops would be to go with 2 x 1 GB sticks of ram. That would future proof you a little more. Also for a few more dollars into the vid card you could go with a 7800 GTX video card which would also future proof you better. This system should scream I would guess an 8000 in 3Dmark 05'.

Edit 2: I would also like to add that the AMD AM2 socket and the new Intel Conroe <--- Bleh....Processor chipsets will be coming out soon so you may want to wait a few months for this as prices on the list up there will go down a bit and you might be able to get into that new technology a bit more. The AMD chipset will support DDR2 so it may be worth waiting for...If nothing else then for a discount on this older stuf to possible get better.