You practically do. I built a $1500 machine almost 3 years ago. 7900GTX, 2 GB PC3200, and a A64 4000+ (non-X2, socket 939). It's practically worthless for new games (Crysis, BioShock, DiRT, etc.) if I want any sort of decent framerate at anything above 1024x768 with at least a little AA, AF, and V-Sync...nothing takes me out of a game more than the slicing you get without v-sync, but turning it on drains so much. Sure, I could through an 8800 GTS in there, but after spending $250, how much of a bottle-neck do you think my CPU would be? SQUEEZED TO DEATH. And since it's Socket 939, X2 options are limited (and dumb), so before you know it...I've upgraded CPU, GPU, RAM, and mobo. Instead, I took that $250, scrounged up another $100, and got a 360.

This isn't meant to be rude, but you bought a really stupid system back then for your 1500 bucks. I built a system three years ago that was ~1000 dollars, Athlon 3500, 1 Gig ram, X800XL as its main parts. The graphics card alone probably saved me ~200 bucks compared to the 7900 GTX you bought. NEVER buy a top of the line graphics card. The performance per dollar is nowhere near worth it. The 2 gig of ram 3 years ago was overkill (and expensive.)

In the three years since, I've had to replace the cheap ass PSU which burned out (got an Enermax with 2 12 volt rails in a local PC store, was a hundred bucks but I didn't feel like waiting 3 days for a newegg one to get here,) and I bought a 7900GT OC about 16 months ago for ~$299.

That rig (morphed into an Athlon 3500 with a 7900 GT, 1 Gig of memory) played Bioshock absolutely GREAT at 1680x1050. I honestly can't remember all my settings, most were high and a few were medium (probably shadows, as I never care about shadows and always switch them to low to get some performance.)

Crysis played fine at 1280x1024 with everything set to medium, shadows to low, with the exception of the final (carrier) level, which for some reason was a slideshow.

So in the end, I spent exactly the same as you did, though a little more spread out, and somehow my rig wound up playing those games better than yours?

I upgraded a few days ago, kept the case, PSU, optical drives and 1 harddisk, bought a new mobo, quad core processor, 4 gig of memory, 8800GT, Zalman cooler and an extra HD for 820 bucks in total. OC'ed to 3 GHZ, it absolutely screams through everything (well, not through Crysis, it plays that on High settings at 30 fps.)

To summarize my longwinded diatribe :

- Never buy a top of the line graphics card. Always get one or two models beneath it. The 8800GT is an absolute BEAST for its money right now. Then two years down the road, take the 200 bucks you saved, and simply buy a card that then is one model beneath the top of the line.

- Never buy anything more than you need. 2 Gig of RAM was brutal overkill then. Ofcourse, memory is so ridiculously cheap now that that doesn't matter anymore, but if you figure you'll need 300 Gig of HD space, get a 320 Gig harddisk, and not a 750 Gig. If you don't plan on overclocking, don't spend 50 bucks on a Zalman cooler. And get a great case, and keep that for 2 or 3 upgrades, same with your optical drives.

For 820 bucks, I just switched every game to maximum settings and got a 30% fps boost. To me, that doesn't seem to be that expensive.

Creston