[Anubis]

I have listed my latest build below. Considerable research proved it to be the best performance for the price at the time. While I'm not an AMD fan, I did actually consider the Zambezi, until I saw the benchmarks.

Antec Three Hundred Illusion ATX Mid Tower Case
BIOSTAR TZ77XE3 1155 ATX Motherboard
Intel Core i5-3570K Ivy Bridge 3.4GHz Quad-Core Processor
G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 16GB DDR3-1600 Memory
OCZ Octane 128GB SATA III Synchronous Solid State Drive
EVGA GeForce GTX 570 1280MB PCI-E Graphics Card

Current Newegg Price: $928.94 (before $35 in rebates)
Newegg Budget Price: $756.94 (before $40 in rebates)


The only components I did not purchase at the time were the optical drive and power supply, which I have many extras of around here. The power supply currently in use is a simple Antec 650W.

If you wanted to cut that down to a budget PC, swap in a GTX 560 and cut the RAM to 8GB. You could even substitute an asynchronous for the synchronous SSD.