I've been gaming for 15 years, though never on a "gaming machine" other than a games console or a bog-standard desktop PC. I just bought one myself precisely 1 month ago - It's my very own PC bought entirely with my own money, and I saved many months for it.
- Zalman Z11 Plus case
- - with 3 intake fans, 2 extraction fans, and 3 dust filters
- 450W super-quiet PSU, system only uses 330W's
- Intel Core i5 3570 3.4GHz
- 8GB DDR3 dual channel RAM clocked at 1600MHz
- Sapphire RADEON HD 7770 1GB, GHz Edition
- - 20% fan speed at idle, 0 wattage and temp of around 29C. Peak temp, 50C is the most I've seen it with benchmarking tools and overlays like CPU-z.
- 500GB WD CB 7200 w/ 64mb cache
Grand total of ~£700 ( ~$1060)
It can play anything and everything at 60fps, from Guild Wars or Blacklight, to Shogun 2 - except PlanetSide 2 and Metro 2033. It can do PS2 at 55fps maxed in warpgate and 25-30fps is supermassive battles; Metro runs at 28fps in combat - 'dat physX, subsurface scattering and tessellation! I just turn flora off and shadows to medium in PS2 and I get 70fps and 35 in battle. Still looks phenomenal with everything else maxed out.
I have Skyrim modded with ENB and about 30 other graphical mods (not including fps-devouring grass, trees and flora mods) at a solid 60fps.
I also run Backbox v3.0 in a VM and I use it to practice hacking my old P4 2.6GHz, 2GB RAM XP machine, which I'm trying to put a server on but am failing miserably; probably because it's a knackered computer I've been using for 8 years. to think I'd gone from 15fps in UT2004, to 70fps in PS2.