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The only people buying into Intel-based systems now are those who don't know any better. A year ago, I would've told someone to go with AMD for gaming or Intel for multi-tasking/multimedia, but that's all changed. Both companies are moving to dual core now, but the difference is that AMD planned for this a long time ago and designed their chips accordingly; Intels answer is a far less elegant afterthought forced upon them too soon by the failure of their current architecture to reach the raw speeds they'd initially hoped for (due to temperature problems). Dual-core completely erases the last advantage Intel had (hyperthreading). So don't be afraid of change, and don't be blindly loyal to a brand name when they're delivering inferior products at higher prices.
Get yourself a nforce4 PCI-E socket 939 motherboard with a cheap Venice core Athlon 64 CPU and you'll have the best possible combo today and also be as future-proof as you could ever hope to be in this ever evolving market. Socket 939 does support the new dual-core CPUs and soon they'll be an affordable upgrade.
As for video cards, for <$300 there is nothing even close to matching the X800XL.
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