^agreed. There's not much need to max out everything unless you really like seeing all those graphics. Otherwise, old gen cards can run recent games pretty decently. You're not really required to upgrade every time a new card/processor comes out so it saves some money before you have to upgrade again. In my opinion though, although you get used games with console gaming and I'm not sure if that exists with PC gaming besides through amazon and such, the prices for PC games go down significantly faster than console games. That and there's usually a buttload of special deals that cause PC games to lower their price. Also, pirating does some good in this age where you can't tell if a game will be good or not anymore. I buy games that have a huge replayability/story. Ironically enough, I did play COD4 while pirated, but I have the official game now because I love the game alot. Whereas some guys you might pay for and then find out that there are numerous bugs with the game because it was rushed or underdeveloped (aka black screen where your character just falls to his death INFINITELY in Spiderman Friend or Foe). The problem with PC games I have atm is that a lot of them (especially RPGs/Dungeon Crawls) usually have a load of bugs. I think it's ridiculous to buy a game for about $50 and then find out it's somewhat unplayable to the number of bugs (Titan's Quest had like 9 patches within a month whereas NWN2 I heard from my friend had a load of patches on the day it was Released.) I thought that this past winter was pretty good for PC gamers. There were good games that made gamers put faith in the gaming department again to buy the actual game (COD4, Orange Box, Crysis, etc.). I hope the quality of these games stays that way; otherwise, PC games will continue downhill like before.