Digital Home Thoughts: Maximum PC's Guide to a $700 Gaming Rig

"Our budget gaming rig is all about instant gratification: a way for you to fill your gaming hunger with a state of the art, speedy machine, capable of playing today’s games at 1080p resolutions, for less than $700. With our instructions, you will see how you can build it yourself in less than hour. On top of that, we’ll tell you how you can easily supersize your budget box with future upgrades."

I have been assembling my own PCs for a very long time, and I generally think that assembling them is not the hardest thing; it is deciding what components to purchase that makes many give up. In particular, video cards with their extremely fine segregation do not help (nVidia's pulled a trick from the past recently: the GTX 560 and GTX 560 Ti are different cards, but who is going to tell without knowing the GPU market well?). Maximum PC offers a good starting point, but depending on where you live, the "best" part for a budget gaming rig might be different. What are your own suggestions for a cheap gaming rig?