Please, Listen to Goku. You are going to get a vastly better gaming experience on Intel hardware, its just a sad fact. I want AMD to be as competitive performance wise as the next guy, but they just are not. Even if they did have comparable performance in gaming, they still nearly double the power and heat of Intel CPU's.
So ill settle this argument by showing you that you can build a potent gaming system for less that $500, with an i5 Ivy Bridge. On this machine you will be able to play PS2 all freaking day, and stream, record whatever the hell you want without a problem and you won't have to be fooling around arguing w/ us about i3's or Phenoms, or FX or Trintiy or whatever else AMD is still selling. The i5 will probably still be bad ass CPU 3 years from now, and next spring when AMD comes out w/ 8000 Series GPU's and you get your Tax return back or save some scrap up. You can easily pop that HD7770 and put an HD8870 in the your box, and sell the Old GPU w/o having to remove more than about 4 screws and a power connector.
PCPartPicker part list /
Price breakdown by merchant /
Benchmarks
CPU: Intel Core i5-3470 3.2GHz Quad-Core Processor ($184.99 @ Amazon)
Motherboard: ASRock B75M-DGS Micro ATX LGA1155 Motherboard ($61.97 @ Newegg)
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($24.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($59.99 @ Amazon)
Video Card: MSI Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition 1GB Video Card ($69.99 @ Newegg)
Case: Rosewill FBM-01 MicroATX Mini Tower Case ($28.42 @ Amazon)
Power Supply: Corsair Builder 430W 80 PLUS Certified ATX12V Power Supply ($16.99 @ Newegg)
Total: $447.34
(Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.)
(Generated by PCPartPicker 2012-11-22 09:59 EST-0500)