what's in a good games PC these days?

i haven't bought a new computer for maybe 5 years (apart from a laptop) which i kitted myself with parts and is still working ok (no fancy games though) but thinking now maybe it's time to get a new one. but i'm so out of touch with what's good these days.

is it still about having a beefy graphics card and a trillion byes of RAM?

Yeah, pretty much. If you want to spend LOTS you'll get a nice new core i7 CPU, 3GB of DDR3, and a Geforce 280. If you're feeling especially rich you could even pop one of those nice new intel SSD drives in there. Then you'll *just* about be able to play crysis at full detail and resolution. But if you're more worried about EVERY OTHER GAME ON THE MARKET than you are about crysis, then you should build a system around a nice Core 2 Duo (or quad, if you like, the Q6600 is a lovely cpu and very overclockable), with 4GB of DDR2 (which has got really cheap in the last week or so) and then...well, a GF 260 or 280, or a Radeon 4800 series card. They're all pretty great (because ATI/AMD have come up with a decent design for the first time in about a year and a half) - again, for most stuff you'd be fine either way, but if you want to play crysis then the 280 will give you quite a few more frames per second.

Course, the i7 route will give you future upgradability: it's a new socket type, so it needs its own mobo and ram and everything, and that'll all be THE FUTURE. Trouble is, if you want to build this side of christmas, you'll be early adopting the i7 (it only came out a couple of weeks ago) and therefore will be paying far too much for it. Meanwhile there are plenty of good deals on C2D stuff around at the moment.

You know actually, the best way to figure out what should go in a new PC build is just to buy one issue of Custom PC.

If you're going to spend around $1000-ish it might not be horrible to just go with a pre-built Dell, going for the better video card options. A new Studio XPS with i7 and Radeon 4850 (no monitor) is $1150 right now. Though somebody tell me if I'm wrong, I think at that ptivr range you're not saving much money by building.

I've been a veteran of the PC upgrading wars since like 1988. I got to the point where I couldnt handle spending hundreds of dollars every year to constantly update and dropped out and bought an xbox. I still miss playing RTS's with a mouse and always blame my awfulness in FPS's on the controllers but I think it was worth it.

My main thing is I hate gaming that close to the screen. I already spend all day in front of a monitor.

actually that's a point - if i spend that much money on a new PC will it still be not as good as a PS3 or xbox 360 or something?

An average PC will be "better" than a PS360, if by better you mean more powerful. By average, I mean 600 dollar PC.

MacBookPro running XP lol.

if i spend that much money on a new PC will it still be not as good as a PS3 or xbox 360 or something?

There are what, 4 or 5 PC games a year worth playing, these days? Compared with I guess around 10-15 a year on 360. So yeah, a beefy PC will be more powerful, but in terms of fun per £, you should definitely go for a 360 first, if you don't have one already.

Course, ahem, you could offset the cost of a PC with lots of "free" games. But the ready availability of "free" PC games is the reason there are so few worth playing. PC gaming is definitely a dying market, so it does seem a bit daft to invest lots in it at the moment, unless you're just interested in having a nice machine for its own sake (and for all the other stuff a nice meaty PC can do).

"There are what, 4 or 5 PC games a year worth playing, these days? Compared with I guess around 10-15 a year on 360"

hey, i laughed

really, i just want to play stuff like pro evo and GTA4 somewhere. if i get a PC my only worry is that i'd buy one that is not quite good enough and then it'd like start dropping frame or something, or crash (program, i'd expect to crash in GTA), that'd make me cry, maybe a 360 is safer, and cheaper..