Regarding graphics cards: That's an interesting thing. Let me give you a little crash-course in choosing one, since the graphics card is the centerpiece of any gaming box.
First of all, you have two different interfaces - AGP and PCI-Express. Some cards are PCI-E only, others are AGP only, and many are available in both. Now, PCI-E is newer and technically has twice the bandwidth of AGP 8x, but that doesn't help performance even with the highest end video cards available. The main advantages of PCI-E are future expansion (since AGP will eventually be left by the wayside) and SLI. SLI is cool because it lets you put two paired graphics cards in a pair of PCI-E slots and they'll work together as a single unit. A pair of GeForce 6600GTs in SLI will be roughly equivalent to a similarly priced single GeForce 6800GT.
Anyway, PCI-E sounds cool right? Well, it's Intel-only for now. That brings us to motherboard chipsets. I don't know much about Intel chipsets, but I know that if you want PCI-E, you have to buy an Intel CPU. I'd say it's worth it to sacrifice PCI-E if it means you get to use an AMD processor instead of an Intel. Pick out a motherboard with a socket 939 interface, made by a reputable company, and which uses the nForce3 250 chipset. Epox, Gigabyte, MSI, Asus, and DFI are all good companies... in general, you don't want to skimp on the motherboard and get a cheapo (like a Chaintech or PC Chips) but you don't need to get all spendy unless you really know what you're doing. $70-$80 is a good amount to spend. Plus, just about any modern motherboard in that price range should have 2-4 onboard SATA ports.
Okay, now you have to decide which card to get. Here's a generalized order of performance.
nVidia:
GeForce 5900XT
GeForce 6600
GeForce 6600GT
GeForce 6800
GeForce 6800GT
GeForce 6800 Ultra
ATI:
Radeon 9800 Pro
Radeon 9800XT
Radeon X800 Pro
Radeon X800XT
Unfortunately, ATI doesn't really have a midrange card. No Radeon X800 non-Pro. So there's this big gap between the $200 9800 Pro and the almost-$400 X800 Pro. The 9800XT isn't much faster than the 9800 Pro, but it costs $300. Bad deal. nVidia is the way to go if you want a $200-$300 video card. My GeForce 6800 non-Pro is perfect. A 6600GT will be almost as fast and it'll cost less. Just make sure if you want the 6600GT that you get the AGP version, which is more expensive than the PCI-E version.
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