It's not that hard, matey, in fact it's quite easy. All you do is plug stuff together, that is all. Currently, if I were you I'd wait a little longer, January 2011 the new Sandy Bridge Intel 1155 socket comes out.This will force the current i3, i5 and i7 (1156) prices down and you can make a choice between the two. I'd suggest you waited a little longer. In the meantime I'd pay overclock3d.net a visit or go on youtube and search for timetolivecustoms. Go on the fella's channel and start watching. Currently, IMO, the most bang for buck set-up GPU wise is an Nvidia GTX460 SLI (2 of them). CPU-wise, for your budget an I5 760, maybe, and 4 gig of Mushkin DDR3 dual channel and you're set. But, yeah, as I said in the beginning, I'd wait another month. The ATI/AMD 69xx series GPUs are also coming out so that's not bad.