First of all, I played Halo CE not even on a P4 and it ran full speed. It's called you go AMD, and it costed nowhere near 3500 dollars so that's full of shit.
Second of all, why would you get a 3960X for gaming(that shit is NOT for gaming, that's for powerful personal workstations for certain professionals that want to work at home) when you can pick up an Ivy Bridge or a cheaper Sandy Bridge CPU? a Core i5 is perfectly fine and i7 is pretty much overkill unless you use your PC for things other than gaming. Not to mention anybody who SLI 680s are fucking idiots when cross fire scales better, even if you want 100% PhysX support, you'd only get maybe 1 or a 690 then get a cheaper Nvidia card for PhysX, not to mention you are suppose to get SSDs which have dropped in price by A LOT recently to Raid-0 2 of them and nobody buys a fucking blu ray drive unless the person is a complete idiot. You also don't need a Quad core to run Skyrim, 1GB GPU is so common that you can find one for like 50 bucks or less, that's how much I sold each of my old 4890s for months back, and people I sold them to are very happy with those.
I had a 360, I still have a PS3, and I have a Wii. Oh and recently a Wii U, if I'm a real gamer that enjoys games in general, the hardware total is definitely not cheap for console gaming, especially counting the added cost of XBL Gold I had to pay for 3 years which added another 100 USD to it. Unless you have an absolute end all console gaming box that runs everything from all companies with no hidden cost like Gold, the price argument is dumb especially if you've been using XBL Gold for the past 7 years.
Finally, who the fuck uses a PC for pure gaming only, I usually run a game while having other shit going on at the same time, you get a PC for multi-tasking goodness, all your emails and social networks are all in those browser tabs and you'd have access to them immediately.
