Ok so I went ahead and built the Tested 1500 gaming Pc

And it's awesome.  Actually I didn't just build the 1500 gaming pc.  I used the 2600K i7 processor instead of the i5.  I bought 8GB of 1600Mhz DDR3 instead of 1333Mhz DDR3, and I bought a 1 TB Caviar Black drive instead of the 2 TB.  I bought everything else right down to the specs they're using.  And like I said, it's awesome.  I'm mainly interested in my computer being hyper fast without breaking a sweat- so I turned on Intels IMP overclocking instead of setting up manual overclocking and the only default I changed was to actually turn down the max OC multiplier from 43 to 40.  At 43, my CPU was hitting higher temps than I'd like so I tuned it down.  And it plays everything.  Below is my list of games installed (all of which play at maximum settings at native resolution).  I don't have some super great monitor so native resolution is 1680x1050


Crysis
Crysis: Warhead
Crysis: Wars
HL 2, Ep 1 & 2, Lost Coast
Portal
Garrys Mod
TF2
Unreal Tournament 3
The Sims 3
Civ IV


Of these- crysis wars seems to never work.  This sucks.  It appears the game hangs when trying to join a game.  That's ok though, because TF2 always works and Unreal Tournament 3 works (more on that later).


So Crysis was the first game I booted up.  Wow that game looks good.  It plays smoothly and everything works as it should.  HOWEVER, damn that game is hard.  I'm not sure if I'm just stupid or what, but I really suck at this game.  It's total crytek through and through though.  It feels like what I used to think of Far Cry as, but just a little better.  Enemy AI is just ever so advanced than before, and levels are 'bigger and better' or so some say.  I legitimately like this game, but it is really really hard.  I'm committed to finishing the game though, so oh well.

Unreal Tourney 3 was game number two.  And surprise downgrade number one.  I used to be a huge UT fan.  I've owned and played bunches of every UT out there on the PC except this one.  Now I've owned them all.  And there's a fairly small number of servers still active with a fairly small community base playing on fairly ugly community maps.  Booo.

Then was TF2, my surprise number one of these games.  That game is legit fun.  And while I've owned the orange box for the xbox, TF2 plays way better on the PC.  So much so in fact, that last night I had a sucessful round as a heavy.  I never play as a heavy- nor have I ever found success with this game.  So go that.  However- I was upset that in one round I got autoswitched to the other team, and immediately lost interest in the game.  But looks like TF2 will be my go-to multiplayer PC game for a while.

Garrys Mod was a huge surprise.  I had no clue what to expect and though I'm somewhere at the 'put the square peg in the square hole' level of understanding, I'm having fun.

I think overall the observation I'm having is how good games look these days.  I noticed that UT3 is throttled on the PC, which makes me mad(ish) but all the other games appear to be PC games- they look really good and play amazingly.  So anyways that's all I really have to say.  I suppose for the next year or so every new game that comes out will have me in fits deciding between the xbox and pc version.... meh....