I'm not going to say Intel's are "shit" but I do say that Athlon 64's have quite an edge over them in gaming
firstly:
Athlon 64's already have anti-viral measures
Hyperthreading is good for multimedia, but quite lousy for gaming often decreasing performance
longer pipelines means it takes more time for the CPU to process instructions than with shorter pipelines; this is why AMD CPU's with lower frequencies often outperform Intel CPU's with their lower frequencies, because they have shorter pipelines
and most socket 939 processors are already 90nm; I'm certain they have a 90nm 3000+, 3200+, 3500+ and some FX's
Intel CPU's seem to do better in multimedia apps but AMD CPU's are more often better in gaming
if you're building this machine for gaming, I would also recommend an Athlon 64 3500+ winchester (socket 939)
with an Abit AV8 3rd eye, Gigabyte K8NS or Asus A8V
for graphics cards, IMO the best for its money is the Nvidia 6600 GT. you might want to go higher with the 6800 GT if you can save money elsewhere but the 6600 is still a really fast graphics card
I would recommend against DDR2 ATM because it is in its early stages, and by the time most people have it, it will be cheaper and better. this applies to PCI-E too.
lower latency RAM makes very little difference to higher latency RAM; the timings are in nanoseconds, so a module running at 2-2-2-5 will only get 4% better performance than a 3-3-3-8 module (lower timings are better) but will usually be at least twice the price, when higher frequency RAM will give you a lot better performance increase.
I would suggest Kingmax PC4000 Hardcore RAM because it is cheap, reliable, really overclockable, and really fast. the price is about the same as medicore PC3200 RAM
for hard drives I recommend Seagate or Western Digital 120GB-200GB SATA drives
both companies make good quality HDD's, I personally prefer Seagate for their low noise
LG and Pioneer 16x dual layer DVD±R/RW drives are IMO the better of the DVD burners, 16x is the fastest, and they are both good quality
for a case, I would recommend one from Antec or Thermaltake. Antec cases often come with a PSU, and being Antec, those PSU's will be good quality
Thermaltake cases don't come with a PSU, but the ones they make are still good quality. a lot of people like the look of Thermaltake cases better, even though they are more expensive
you can get second hand CRT's which are really good; I got a 21" Sony Trinitron for $380 (aus) which has awesome graphics, despite only being used with my TNT2 video card (now overclocked)
I learned a lot of what I know on this forum