Best gaming cpu thats not too much $$$?

It'd be a little better if you gave us your budget, so we'd be able to give you more details.. But try www.alienware.com. And the Dell XPS series is also very good.

Go with the AMD 64 X2 series chips. They are rock solid and outperform the intel chips. You can find the AMD 64 X2 5200 for about 300 right now. That is a great chip for gaming and it uses the AM2 socket so you'll be able to upgrade later on as well, since the 939 socket is going to be obsolete soon. I would stay away from the gimmicky SLI video card setup though. Prices will drop for that in a year or so. Plus, you can get close performance with one good video card. Spend your money on the AMD X2, a good socket AM2 motherboard, and a minimum of 2 gb memory and you'll be outperforming the competition. As for the gaming itself... your PC can only take you so far. The rest is up to you. Happy Hunting.

AMD Athlon 64 or the Intel Pentium 4HT (Hyper-Threaded)

Can you build your own computer? You can select some good components and still keep a decent budget. For about a $1400, you can make quite a solid machine. More careful choices and you could get something for under $1000.

Alienware and other custom build companies charge with ridiculous margins, so they aren't great for budgets...

A Pentium 4 with Hyper Dreading is good enough.