First time building

[DorkFury]

Haha, thanks for the several opinions! I've thought about it and I don't think I'll need an SSD since I've never really experienced one before. As for the video card though, I was looking at the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti for quite some time and I was wondering if this one was on the better side or not. If not, should I look at all the ones you listed above (6870, 7850)

[TherealYeno]

Personally I am not a fan of Nvidia cards until the 560 ti. I would go with AMD in this price range. Now if you can work a 7850 into your budget then you have a beast.

[SauceBoss]

i agrea with yeno on this, nvidia low end graphics cards offer very bad bang for the buck ratio and amd does a much better job with those budget cards.
one card that i found in an amazing deal is the Zotac GTX 560 in 145$(after rebate):
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814500225 and 145 for the 560 is quite a bargin.