I think you are being ripped off with that 8600 card. Its waaaay too expensive compared to REAL market price.
For gaming on Intel, more CPU cache ==> better performance.
So get atleast Core2Duo E8200. It has very little performance difference compared to higher end CPUs in same series, and you can always OverClock it.
But from most reviews, the performance with 1MB L2 is low, 2MB L2 much higher than 1MB, and 4MB provides a smaller margin of increase over 2MB. So I suppose 3MB can have everything delicately balenced. So if you are on a budget, get Core2Duo E7200. It is *JUST* about right for you.
Since you want mumbai prices, I suggest you check up at *www.theitwares.com/processors/processors.htm for the CPU prices. TheItWares is an online computer store and they ask rather decent prices for their items. They are based in Mumbai.
For gaming, compared to 9600GSO, HD3850 has better performance with AntiAliasing turned off, and both come at the same price. But sadly, in India ATI cards are HIGHLY expensive, and HD3850 costs 10K approx instead of something like 6.5 to 7K. The three cards which are NOT expensive in India relative to outside India are HD4850 and HD4870, which have a huge demand in the market right now, but they are waaay
beyond your budget costing 10K and 15K respectively. The third one is HD3450, which is waaay
below your budget costing less than 2K and having a poor performance for gaming.
Anyway, this means 9600GSO is the best card available to you. The Palit 9600GSO Sonic is available at 6.5K at *www.theitwares.com/gfxcards/gfxcards.htm which is quite decent.
And yes, a dirt cheap version of the 8600GT 256MB GDDR3 is the Mercury one. Mercury sells it for around 3K, but it has only 1 year warranty compared to the usual 3 years. If you need a high quality CPU, then reduce money allotment for GPU and get this.
Since you are buying in mumbai, try to check if the prices the dealers offer to you are lesser than or equal to theitwares.com prices. If they are higher, it makes a lot of sense to buy from there. ( Me and others in bangalore have such store online and need to run around in the heat at SP Road
)
DONT get AMD if you are mainly into gaming and photoshop. Many games are optimised for an even number of cores, so Phenom X3 might have some small issues. And photoshop has difficulty to recoganise the third core as reported by one of our forum members, gx_saurav. Intel also overclocks brilliantly compared to AMD.
For motherboard, P35 is good if you want to overclock the E7200. Its supposed to easily reach 3.0GHz on P35. Search around if you can't find a good one. MSI, ASUS, Abit are all good. BioStar is a nice cheap option.