AMD FX or AMD Phenom

I would forward the Phenom too, it has far more potential imo. At least as far as I've had the 955 and 965, both were easily OCed and the people that ended up getting the PCs never complained. You might, however, want to upgrade that gfx card. An overclocked 965 + HD6950 has trouble playing BF3 at 1920*1200 on all high settings from what I heard.

There are none in that price range The lowest I would go would be the 6850 and even that will have issues with BF3 at any decent settings.

Well by "decent" I mean med/high settings on a normal res, if you dont mind lower resolutions and lower settinga ... go for it. Just check some benchmarks.

Imo it's pointless getting anything more than the 955, chips are pretty much the same as the 965 / 975.

No, not necessarily. When considering CPUs many things have to be taken into account, and it's not as simple as saying: more cores = better, higher frequency = better. A new get quad core Intel i5 could beat an eight core FX with higher speeds And @SmartAlley if you still want this thread open, tell me. I'll close it since it's old and I suppose you've gotten reasonable feedback (3:1).