I'm not sure if you got any information or made any decisions on this, but these are my observations.

First, you definately don't want to be looking at Pentiums. There is so much more that gives you better performance for the price.

My choices depending on the platform of your choice would be either an Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 (it runs at 2.13 Ghz, but it does much more per clock than older generation P4's), or an AMD64 3800 X2 (runs at 2.0Ghz). For a bit more performance you could go for a 4200 or 4600, depending on the money you plan to spend.

AMD used to be undisputably more efficient than Intel, but with Core 2, Intel has some viable alternatives which consume way less power and have more performance.

If you plan to go AMD, you'll probably be looking at an AM2 platform. Unfortunately the 939 will be phased out. If so, you'll require DDR2 memory (pretty much the same for Intel). For the best performance you'll want to find DDR2 memory running at 800Mhz (with CL around 4). Because of the memory controller integrated into the CPU, AMD has better memory performance, but is more sensitive to latency.

As to video cards, if you don't require Shader Model 3 support, an ATI Radeon x850 XT gives pretty good performance. Otherwise an x1900 gives good price/performance. If you are on a budget, you could go with an x1800 which still gives good performance. Avoid the x1300 and x1600. They just aren't worth it.

I'm not too familar with Nvidia cards, but you could probably find some comparisons between the ATI cards mentioned above and their "equivalents" for Nvidia. An important thing to note is that as of this moment, Nvidia's cards are unable to do both Anti-aliasing and HDR lighting at the same time. You're limited to one or the other. If your game can do both, and you want to utilize both, go with ATI for now. Note: Valve did their own version of HDR in Half Life 2, and so you can use both AA and HDR on Nvidia cards.

As to the best price/performance, you'd be looking at either an x1900XT or a 7900GT. They give excellent performance for the price you're going to spend. You can of course spend more to get more performance, but you're paying alot more for not as much of a performance boost. Since prices are continually dropping, this advice would obviously need revising. They'd either be cheaper or something even better would fill the slot.

Quote Originally Posted by sharrukin
I am going to be buying a new computer and I need it to be at least;

Recommended:
- 3 GHz Intel Pentium 4 or equivalent processor
- 1GB System Ram
- ATI Radeon X800 series, NVIDIA GeForce 6800 series or higher video card

Minimum System Requirements:
- 128MB Direct3D compatible video card with DirectX 9.0c compatible driver
- DirectX 8.1 compatible sound card

What I would like to know is what is an equivalent AMD processor as my understanding is that they are more efficient than Intel?

Supported Video Cards:
- ATI Radeon X1900 series
- ATI Radeon X1800 series
- ATI Radeon X1600 series
- ATI Radeon X1300 series
- ATI Radeon X850 series
- ATI Radeon X800 series
- ATI Radeon X700 series
- ATI Radeon X600 series
- ATI Radeon X300 series
- ATI Radeon 9800 series
- ATI Radeon 9600 series
- ATI Radeon 9500 series
- NVIDIA GeForce 7900 series
- NVIDIA GeForce 7800 series
- NVIDIA GeForce 7600 series
- NVIDIA GeForce 7300 series
- NVIDIA GeForce 6800 series
- NVIDIA GeForce 6600 series
- NVIDIA GeForce 6500 series
- NVIDIA GeForce 6200 series
- NVIDIA GeForce 6100 series
- NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 series
- NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 series
- NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600 series
- NVIDIA GeForce FX 5500 series

The other question is what is the best card for the money here?