Tom's Hardware: Building a $500 Gaming Computer

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His tech info is often biased and misleading, but this guide is a nice snapshot of low-end but workable performance...which is where I live.

My usually chronic hardware envy has been in remission for the past few years, most likely because I stopped playing FPS games and have been getting my gaming fix from the much less hardware intensive MMORPG genre.

Not only is FPS gaming the domain of the young and their console-trained fast twitch hand eye coordination, my main goal in any game is to chat with my pals while engaging in a low frequency communal activity, not display my l337n355 by dominating the virtual foe (who's an undersocialized 13 year old nerd anyway, judging from my years of demographic research).

If they lived in town, I'd have a poker game or something.
Since they're spread out over several thousand miles of Pacific coastline like one skimpy pat of resturaunt butter over a loaf of french bread, online action is my best bet.

I've ridden my current machine about as far as I can milk it...you know you're in trouble when you download a demo, click on the installer and a pixilated Don Rickles pops out of the icon like a jack in the box, calling your CPU a hockey puck and spilling gin all over your desktop wallpaper.

It was fairly badass rig around the time of SoF II, but computers age faster than dogs. In consumer tech terms, I'm trying to watch HD programming on a B&W tv set.

And I've reached the black hole of upgrading....to improve things any more will take a new motherboard, which will need a new CPU and new RAM etc etc. I'm in "whole new computer" territory, which is problematic when your wife reacts to computer purchases like hippies to soap or vampires to garlic.

So the $500 PC starts looking more attractive...