I want to be able to play Crysis 2, doesn't have to be on max but don't want minimum either...
A 800$-900$ machine (just for the hardware, one assumes you already have an OS available) should be able to play that on max in-game settable options in full HD resolution easily.
Crysis 2 is not that much of a hardware hog, Crysis 1 is actually much harsher on the hardware. Or, alternatively, ramping up everything to the max by manual tweaking from "outside" the game in Crysis 2 (although you won't really notice much of a difference in image quality, but at a sharp drop in performance".
I have a relatively lousy i5-760 (superseded by quite a few relatively cheap sandybridges) with a not-that-spectacular GTX 460, and I can play Crysis 2 on in-game max everything just fine in 1280x720 windowed mode on a 1600x1200 desktop (windowed mode works a bit slower than full screen mode) with quite a bit of stuff opened up in the background, level load is not that much of a big deal even if I have a cheap "green" HDD (2 TB, but still, cheap and slow), and only 4 GB of RAM (with 2 GB of it taken by the OS and most of my usual background-running programs, so only about 2GB available for the game itself).
So, no, you don't need the most expensive CPU money can buy (it's actually mostly a waste of cash), you don't even need the most expensive video card (and you certainly don't need multiple video cards in SLI mode), RAM is dirt cheap, and a fast HDD is far more "bang for buck" than a small SSD.
If you want the best of both worlds, you COULD get a small-ish SSD, a fast moderate size HDD and a big storage HDD, all with a second-best (i5-2500) or even third-best (i5-2400) tier sandybridge ("k" version optional) on a Z68 chipset and ENABLE SSD CACHING on the fast-ish HDD. For a video card, I would say, either go with a GTX 560 or with a Radeon HD 6850 for now.
Don't build the best you can get for a budget, decide on the target performance and get the cheapest you can that gets you that performance.