For the money you are talking the wood doesn't come into it. Good pickups are the most important. For $650 you could get a cheap Ibanez the upgrade the pickups to Dimarzio Evolutions or EMG 81's (graewt for clear heavy crunch tones) and still get a Marshall 100 DFX from E-Bay. With that set up you would have monster tone and still be loud enough to play with a drummer. The whole wood debate means nothing when you are playing high gain/distortion unless you are an extremely advanced player and are thinking about tone shaping at professional engineer level - you simply won't notice the difference otherwise. The fretboard wood under sthe strings is more for show at this level than anything else.
The most important considerations are the feel of the neck (some people like thick for more chord based playing, other like wafer thin for ultra fast playing), the action (height of the strings - if you want to shred then it has to be low), condition of the fret wire (if second hand this is very important - otherwise you will be looking at redressing the frets for extra cost), the pickups (incredibly important - these create the sound) and whether or not you want to go with a tremelo (it takes longer to set up and tuning up can be tough but you get a lot more options).
If you are thinking Nu Metal then I advise either Dimarzio or EMG pickups - but you really need to sit down with a guitar and try to get a feel for it. For the guitar body and neck I would look at either Ibanez or Jackson. Most Nu Metal is powered by Mesa Boogie Triple Rectifier head/cab combos but that is WAY above budget! Good thing is you can also get major heavy sound from entry level Marshall DFX series, this is what I would go with anyway (I have a 100DFX from ages back and have used Ibanez since the begining). Line 6 Spider and Vox valvetronic 'modeling' amps also make it very easy to get a variety of tones - check them out too.