The only good thing is the CPU, and even that will suffer due to the lack of foresight at AMD, since the lack of parallelism support will hurt it more than core 2 quads in the next 2 years, even with the fsb foibles.
Since you don't list a case, for the same price you can get a pc power and cooling psu, a motherboard that won't die in a week, 4gbs of ddr3 ram, an after-market cooler for your cpu, a radeon 4770 (which consistently outperforms the unit you've listed).
To people taking advice from this man, a few basic rules:
-Avoid AMD until they fix their parallelism issues. Runs fantastically *now*, won't outperform the same core 2 quads you can buy presently in 2 years, and no firmware update can change that.
-Never buy ECS
-Never buy BFG
-Never buy low-end gigabyte
-Buy Kingston, if you want defective, misleadingly labeled, high-latency ram that will likely be DOA
-Do buy Asus
-Do buy EVGA
-Do buy PC Power and Cooling
-Do buy OCZ
-Do buy Corsair
-Do buy antec (except PSUs)
Build a $550 bare-bones gaming PC
by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes | January 26, 2010 12:14pm PST | Image 1 of 6
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CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition 3.4GHz AM3 125W quad-core
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You seem to have a strong view of what not to buy but specifically what would you buy (specifically) for $550.
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