Just installed Far Cry after not having played it in quite a while. With most settings on high, the game runs just fine... until you get into a firefight. Then, the game starts chugging like crazy. I could feel the CPU in my gaming laptop turning the case into a surface suitable for frying eggs on. Trust me, that computer ain't no joke, it's an Acer Ferrari 3400. AMD Athlon 64-powered, with ATI Radeon 9700 Mobility graphics and 512MB of RAM. Its only true weakness is its inherently inferior cooling. The games I run on it actually have better performance during the first few minutes of play... before the CPU heats up. Quite unlike your standard Desktop PC, where the proper combination of cooling components can keep the CPU heat stable in any situation.

I have determined that the ULTIMATE gaming machine, right now, costs an average of around $7000-$8000 (adding up the price of individual parts). For that much, you could buy a pair of used cars... but we all know what I would prefer! ;)

DFI LanParty Motherboard, AMD Athlon 64 FX-57, two Nvidia GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB cards in SLI, two gigabytes of OCZ Platinum Rev. 2 PC3200 RAM... Thermaltake Kandalf case and a PC Power & Cooling 1KW power supply. Four 500GB Hard Drives (Hmm, tough choice between the Seagate or the Hitachi) in a RAID array. Samsung LCD screen with high response rate and a 1280x1024 native resolution... It's my ultimate dream machine.

With a computer like that, I could play Far Cry, F.E.A.R., Half-Life 2, and even Doom III on their highest possible settings!