And Crysis doesn't play at very high settings with playable frame rates on a $400 PC, even assuming the $100 OEM copy of Windows was free.
Not unless you crank down the resolution or are playing on a very small display which pretty much defeats the purpose of all that detail.
I love building overclocked systems as much as the next PC guy, but seriously, you have to call BS when you smell it.
A build that played very high settings, let alone mod extreme settings would require about a $200-300 CPU (a highly overclocked E8400 $165 CPU is about rock bottom for this performance level) and a $300 plus dual GPU VGA solution (at least the equivalent of a HD4870x2) for realistically playable frame rates (no less than 30 fps) at resolutions above 1680x1050 without turning off AA.