You can hardly imagine how excited I am to finally be saying this, but I am finally taking the plunge and shelling out the cash to build my first gaming PC. I've always been a console gamer, and the prospect of playing games on the PC has always been intimidating. Off hand, the only games I have played to any extent on PC have been DOOM 1 & 2, The Sims 2, and The Sims 3. The funny thing is that I'm not sure why I didn't make this move sooner. When I stop to think about how much money I have spent on consoles during this current generation, it makes me just a little bit queasy. I am currently the owner of 3 Xbox 360s (one is RRD), a Playstation 3, and a Wii, all of which probably cost around $1500 at least which would have been more than enough to build a capable gaming rig.

So what changed my mind? To put it simply, I fear that the next generation of consoles will bring more of the same limitations to my gaming experience that the current gen suffers from. For example, when I bought Battlefield 3, I thought it would the the it game for me. I thought I would play it for years as I had played Bad Company 2, sinking hundreds of hours into the multiplayer arenas and having a blast the whole time while doing so. Alas, this has not been the case. Console versions of BF3 were so limited by consoles in terms of player count, the lack of DICE run servers, and so on that the experience is a shadow of what it was when the game originally dropped. Reading about the crazy 64 player match-ups that PC owners are enjoying doesn't help matters much either.

With these things in mind, I had to stop and think about what I actually want out of my gaming experience. To be perfectly honest, I hadn't found the multiplayer arena all that appealing until I started playing FPS games on current gen consoles. I had played online occasionally, or organized LAN parties with friends before that, but I hadn't really ventured out on my own into the multiplayer world until I started playing COD and Battlefield on the 360 a few years ago. Since then, I find that I divide my time equally between single player and multiplayer games, but something has always been lacking in those experiences. What was lacking was depth, and to a certain extent, commitment.

When I started reading about ArmA 2 and the DayZ mod just over a month ago, I was immediately hooked on the concept that this game presents. The idea that a game with such depth and attention to detail could exist was baffling to me. I had been completely ignorant to the fact that something as elaborate as the Arm2 military simulator even existed until recently, and it was exactly what I have been looking for. Don't get me wrong, I knew about MMOs and MMORPGs, but the questing and leveling aspects never really appealed to me. Instead, I wanted the freedom to explore and play a game on my own terms, and that's something that I haven't found on any console game.

I'm not putting consoles down by any means, but the limitations that Sony and Microsoft have placed on their online experiences will be a huge obstacle in coming generations. Hopefully my PC experience will be more fulfilling. At any rate, here are the components that I am looking to build with below. I'm going with AMD components to reduce cost, and I am mostly going on the recommendations that I found on a website for building a capable gaming rig. If anyone has any suggestions, or if you foresee any issues with components I have chosen, please let me know. I would like to keep my budget under $700 if possible, and this list definitely does that.

• HDD: Western Digital WD5000AAKX Caviar Blue Hard Drive - 500GB, 3.5", SATA 6Gbps, 7200RPM, 16MB
• Power Supply: Corsair CMPSU-650TXV2 Enthusiast Series TX650 V2 Power Supply - 650 Watts, ATX, 140mm Fan, 80 Plus Bronze, SLI Ready, Active PFC
• RAM: Patriot G2 Series PGD38G1600ELK Division 2 Edition Desktop Memory Kit - 8GB (2 x 4GB) PC3-12800, DDR3 1600MHz, 9-9-9-24 CAS Latency, XMP Ready
• Case: Apex Vortex3620 Gaming Mid-Tower Case - 10x Drive Bays, USB, eSATA
• Optical Drive: LG GH24NS90B Internal 24X DVD Writer - SATA, M-Disc Compatible, Windows 7 Compatible, OEM, Black
• GPU: MSI R7770-2PMD1GD5/OC Radeon HD 7770 Video Card - 1024MB, GDDR5, PCI-Express 3.0 (x16), 1x DVI, 2x Mini DisplayPort, 1x HDMI, DirectX 11, Dual-Slot, CrossFireX Ready, Eyefinity, Overclocked
• Processor: AMD FD4100WMGUSBX FX-4100 Processor - Quad Core, 8MB L3 Cache, 2MB L2 Cache, 3.60GHz (3.80GHz Max Turbo), Socket AM3+, 95W, Fan, Unlocked, Retail
• Motherboard: ASUS M5A97 AMD 9 Series AM3+ Motherboard - ATX, Socket AM3+, AMD 970 Chipset, 2133MHz DDR3 (O.C.), SATA 6.0 Gb/s, 8-CH Audio, Gigabit LAN, SuperSpeed USB 3.0, CrossFireX Ready

Like I said, this is a budget build list, and I don't want to go over $700, but if there are parts that won't work or some that could take a little bump that won't push me over, I would appreciate any feedback.