would all this make a working computer?

[Harshboy]

Biostar also makes some good boards that are on par with Gigabyte in features, for about $20 less.

I use a Biostar motherboard and I love it's features. On-board Power and Restart buttons really helped me figure out if I wired the Case wrong or I had a dead Motherboard/PSU.

Turned out I had the polarity wrong for the Case's Power Button

[metalcookie]

any recommended graphics cards?

[bicostp]

The GTX 260 216 gives you the best bang for your buck in Nvidia's lineup. I recommend it. (Not only do you also get PhysX physics acceleration, but they also seem to be closer to using the GPU to do more than just make pretty pictures; so far there's a Folding@Home client and a media encoder that use the GPU almost exclusively for embarrassingly parallel calculations. Mine was around $150 after rebate. You definitely don't want to go with anything much older than the 9800 GTX+, since beyond that you're paying more for what you get.

I'm not sure about ATI; I pretty much lost faith in them when the HD 2600 I bought completely screwed up in OpenGL. Missing textures, triangles randomly disappearing for no obvious reason... I know everything's coded in DirectX but it really sucked for emulators like epsxe.

[Harshboy]

Here is the performance of the most recent cards. Any ATi card will cost about the same as the lower performing Nvidia card which makes ATi a better value, but the higher end Nvidia cards are the best you can buy for now.

Nvidia = Green
ATi = Red

9800 GTX, HD4850, GTX 260, HD4870, GTX 260 Core 216, HD4890, GTX 275. GTX 280, GTX 285, GTX 295

I didn't include all variants of the cards, but a HD4850 will play anything you need and with your budget, you can't really get anything better than a GTX 260 Core 216 because the HD4890 are around $210.

I have a HD4870 and it has been great for everything I want it to run. It'll play Crysis if I bump some of the settings down to Gamer/Mainstream at 1920x1080. It still looks amazing.

You can pick up a HD4870 for around $170 these days, I got it when it was around $200.

[xtrmgam3r360]

If you don't play games newer than 2007

Tell that to my P4 + 8600GT.

Oh wait, I don't play games.

I have a P4 + 5600
And I try to play games