I want to hear what you guys would recommend regarding the thread question. Say I want a PC with Windows Vista and a reasonable graphics card to play Crysis and other games on medium to high settings.

Well please give advice on what PC's you would recommend.

How about a Quad Core PC with and 2 9800GTX graphics card and 4GB of system memory and 21 inch LCD monitor and a Hard Disk Drive of around 500GB?

You could get more for $2000. I could get a PC with 4GB RAM, 1T HDD, 3GHz Quad Core CPU and an 8800GTX Ultra for that.

In Australia, they have computer swap-meets were people sell computers that they usually built up themselves for quite cheap, also try looking up Updating kits on ebay, they just contain the processor, motherboard and the box, so you can just chuck all your ram from your old computer into your new one and even buy some more again.

a macbook air

4GB is only interesting if you also take the 64bit version of vista. The system you recommended is fine enough. I could give you some detailed info, but you'll have to do that over MSN or something. Posting in the forums is too time consuming for the both of us.

Crysis, may look ok, but it's a really mediocre FPS with a bland story. I know you have a PS3 and suggest to get that version with additional content running properly instead of the buggy pc version which should be called framedrop crysis.

Crysis will be ok on the PS3 but it will not sell as much as: COD 4, Resistance 2, Kill Zone 2, MGS 4, SOCOM, Resistance: Fall of Man. It would probably be on par with Rainbow Six Vegas 2.

Excluding monitor, it would be 2*9800GX2's with quad core something and 4 gb ram 64 bit vista mobo, case and depending on the parts you'd spend between 1600-2000. So you could squeeze in a monitor if you wanted.

With that system you could play crysis on high at 2560/1600 or very high at a good resolution too.

Or buy all three current generation consoles with lots of cheap second hand games totaling $2000

Rock on lives in Australia, so if he is talking about buying something with Australian Dollars from an Australian shop, then he really isn't going to get a good gaming PC at all.

Of course if he means US dollars in a US shop, that PC would be amazing. 

I am aiming at the US market because over 60% of people on this site are from the US.