The only thing that sucks about Consoles is its not as easy as playing on a PC. Mouse, Keyboard... thats all consoles need and they'll cruise. But in the end I'll just use my Xbox 360 for gaming, and my PC for PC exclusive games. I use to update my PC every year. Obviously that's not very practical, so now that I got an Xbox 360 - and with that, now my new machine has a use-by date of 5 years. Consoles is an effective, money saving approach since you don't need to update the things to handle newer games. So. My wish is that the next gen Xbox (I think microsoft blabbed 2012?) has a mouse and keyboard. If that happens, buh-bye PC gaming. But that's me - each to their own

Having a quad core is a good investment. I didn't unlock my phenom II until I saw performance gains in Dragon Age Origins - I got about a bonus of 30-40% in performance. see for yourself; http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,698761/Dragon-Age-Origins-CPU-benchmarks-75-percent-boost-for-quad-cores/Practice/ in fact flick thru the performance charts in this guide and you will see a Q6600 2.66ghz out doing the E8200 2.66ghz.

congrats, savage5150, but 12GB of ram is the most stupidest way to waste money on a PC. And believe it or not, 3-4GB Of memory is optimum at the moment. Anything below or beyond is stupid. 6GB is forgivable, thanks to triple channel memory. But you won't have much benefits from between that or 3GB. phenom II 550 (unlocked quadcore) @ 3.5ghz stock voltage 4gb ddr2 G.Skill 1066mhz cas5 dual ati 4770's crossfire and i can run the game on max. whoopidoo. i guess i saved a lot of money. If people still got a Core 2 Duo (i.e. e6600) chip overclocked to 3ghz or more, keep it and save your money. just get yourself a decent graphics card and you will be happy. wait for intel's 32nm process to come out or AMD's 6 core CPU ~ next year.

GOD DAMNIT. I recently purchased a pair of 4770's for $220 and they satisfy my wet dreams. Now I gotta save up when Alien vs Predator comes out for a pair of 5850's or 5770's :P