What would be the specs for a budget gaming PC a few years ago?

[Squilliam]

November 2005 (The do I buy a gaming PC or the new fangled Xbox 360 edition)

Budget $500 box.

AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Retail (Socket 939) - Dead upgrade path.

Two sticks 256MB PC3200 DDR

NVIDIA Geforce 6600 - Pretty slow.... (Previous generation mid range vs next gen high end)

Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 10 80GB

Plus the Usual suspects

$500

High end $1100 box.

AMD Athlon 64 3700+ Retail - Still pretty slow.

Two 512MB sticks PC3200 DDR SDRAM - Matches Xbox 360 totals (IIRC System ram must hold a copy of GPU ram at all times - for alt/tab)

eVGA GeForce 7800GT - A little slower than the Xbox 360 GPU (It was closer to a 1950XT at the time)

Hitachi Deskstar T7K250 250GB

$1086 with the usual suspects.