looking for advice on a solid gaming computer

my wife will be leaving for iraq in 30 days for a 1 year deployment, soem real good money will hopefully be coming in, thinking of having a computet build thru one of the custom builders, i knoow the i should start with a good foundation, this computer will be mainly for gaming and internet surfing, im not a hardcore gamer, manly play guild wars , will be playing the new ncsoft game AION which will come out in september, also looking at dabbling in maybe crysis and COD 4, should i go with AMD or Intel CPU, also how much memory and video card suggeztion, i got a nice 22 inch HDTV/lcd monitor already, its 1080, so don t need a monitor, would like to stay under 1, 500 dollars.

If you want a custom build you could try CyberPowerPC, or Alien, but they are expensive - if you have a little tech. know-how you could build it yourself and save a few hundred $$$ easily...