wow.. for under a 1,000. BUILD IT YOURSELF
quad cores can be bought now for under $290. On newegg my friend got a quadcore motherboard combo for $400. QUAD CORE! WITH A GOOD MOBO! that leaves you 600$ for RAM, FANS, LED LIGHTS, CDRW/DVD burner, VID CARD, HARD DRIVES!!
dude tiger direct and newegg offer 10,000RPM 150GB hard drives for less than $160. And if you don't need 10,000RPM then spring for a cheap 500GB hard drive! PowerSupply to run quad core you need at least a 600w.
OR, get a good DUOcore. That way you can leave more money for RAM, PowerSupply, CD Burner, Vid Card, Drives, etc. For under 1000 bucks you can do a lot. Mine, with speakers, keyboard, mobo, ram, case, DVD burner, hard drives, powersupply, two monitors, mouse, fan controller.. came to about $3400. But i'm 22, and haven't had a 'new' computer since the 8th grade.. so like.. i was 14. I just kept upgrading old parts. That was my treat to myself.. heh. BUT ANYWAYS... $1,000 means don't buy store made, buy parts yourselves online to build. AND LOOK FOR BUNDLE SAVERS! don't buy every part individually, lots of parts you need can be bought together to save you lots of guap.
just be sure, in my opinion, to budget yourself AROUND your vid card or processor. Make the conscious decision before you spend a dime and ask yourself "Am i building a computer for gaming, one for hard core processing, or a happy medium". I'd say a happy medium. Which in that case budget your system around your processor first. you may only want and need duocore since you may never really need/use multi-threading apps. For a grand im sure a nice duocore, nVidia 8800 GTS or GT, and 2gigs of RAM should run you a little under budget before you gotta buy the other stuff.