If you were building a PC today, meeting the recommended spec would cost you less than $100 for the CPU and $100 for the graphics card.

Not too bad. I guess my CPU is pretty old already but I don't think it's really been an issue so far. GPU is still the most important single component.

well on the topic of specs i was looking at laptops before deciding to build an pc and the gaming laptops the reviewers would try out crysis and would get medium settings and stuff. I end up building my pc for over 1000 dollars cheaper than an laptop and today playing crysis on maxed out settings. My pc cost me 1000 dollars and with that news on homefront i am going to have no touble with Homefront or many games this year other than Crysis 2 which i maybe get on min maybe because we all know that crysis is made for computers 5 years in advance.

My laptop will not run it...oh well. Hopefully I'll be able to play brink.

Looks like I'll be needing to buy a new PC at somepoint soon. This one's lasted me for 5 years now but the CPU is just too slow for the new batch of games comming out.

Do you know the current specs? What games would you like to be able to play, and at what resolution?

Well I'm currently on a 3800 X2 with 2Gb RAM and Win XP (and I hear some games releasing soon require DX10/11). My GPU is fine (8800GTS) for most games. Normally I'd just upgrade the CPU, get Win7 and upgrade the RAM, but that also means changing the Mboard as I'm still on the old Socket 939. It's lasted well at around 720-ish resolutions for most games, and retaining medium-high settings (except for Metro 2033 which I had to run on low).

I'm finding games are becomming more CPU intense however. Dragon Age was pretty CPU intensive and I had a fair bit of slow-down.

Anyway, I haven't given it much thought, but I don't have much money at the moment so it'd have to be value for money parts. Probably an 4-core AMD CPU and DDR3 board/RAM and reuse the 8800 until I have more money comming in. I'll probably have to re-use the HDD and DVD-drive. You think the PSU will still be stable enough?