You picked the latest of everything, so it will last you a long time, unless you decided to step into the next level (multiple screens, super computing...ect)

Man, these threads on modern PC specs really make me realize just how archaic even the PS3 is power wise by this point... suddenly 512MB of RAM doesn't look so flash.

Well, my Core 2 Duo E6400 and Radeon HD 4850 can run almost everything and not at the lowest setting even... So I suppose you don't need a whole lot more power to run everything. Then comes the question: What settings do you want to run games at?

So really it's not much to run everything to the max today.

What's the closest thing out there that can compete with these beast of machines you guys are posting?

what do you men by that? 

good ol' typos 

There was a decent article on eurogamer about building a custom pc for £305 that tops current consoles comfortablty.


Really thinking of going back to oc with things like multiplayer subscriptions for live and online passes.

Thinking of spending around 450-500 pounds.

Well there is probably DDR4, Intel's next architecture tick, Nvidias GK100 chip or AMD's 28nm refresh. But seriously no mortal man will notice if you used an i5 3450 or equivalent. Besides Intel likes to change the pin outs on their 'tick' cycle so you may not even be able to upgrade to the latest. In any case I wouldn't personally go for a major PC hardware upgrade until I knew what the PS4 and XB3 were packing, far too easy to overshoot or undershoot at this point.

my gpu, a hd 5870, is from 2009. i have 8gb ram and an i7 2600k. i can play almost everything on high or ultra in 1080p if i want to be over 40fps. battlefield 3 on ultra with only 2x aa and 16x anisotropic filtering and i have i believe 40-45fps (but don't remember exactly). so, maybe for 60fps i have to go little bit down with the specs but i can still run every pc game with more fps and high settings than the console counterpart. i would say it will be enough for 2 more years to play at least most games in high or middle settings to play above 40fps. if i would go down to 720p which is the maximum for most console games atm, i could run everything much much faster than on console with high or ultra settings.

there are few settings for pc games which kill almost every gpu like ubersampling in the witcher 2 (thats like you play the game in double the resolution you really play). i play the witcher 2 without that but everything else on high is fine to have more than 50fps most of the time. maybe sometimes below that not sure.

maybe this will help you for your question.

A program? Specific game? whats the biggest thing out there that pushes hardware right now?