My current machine is a Dell Dimension 9200: C2D 6300 @ 1.8ghz, 4g RAM, Radeon 4670 w/1g VRAM. Its a great computer and still works very, very well. But, sadly, I like gaming and thusly I am wanting to upgrade sometime in the future.

Its very tempting to want to go out and spec out the biggest, baddest thing possible. Its also pretty darn easy, I might add. No, what's challenging is trying to get a good machine that's pretty darn affordable, yet provides an upgrade path!

* Keeping my current video card

* Centurion 5 case

* Antec 550w power supply

* 4g DDR3 RAM

* 640g HDD @ 7200rpm

* DVD burner

* Windows 7 64-bit OEM

There's the easy part. This would be the same no matter what I got in all likelihood. The real trick? Choosing a CPU, which then determines motherboard type. Intel's i5 CPU is nice. Very nice. Its $200, and a motherboard for it is going to be at least $100. Now, the trick for me is that since I live in Hawai'i, I don't get free shipping from Newegg. So, saving money here and there can help me out with my budget. So, what am I looking at? AMD CPU's. And here is where it gets hard! For $100 or less, I can choose from:

* Athlon II X4. Slower speed, but quad-cores are great for multitasking and multi-CPU games and applications. However, according to Tom's Hardware, there's not much benefit to having four cores for gaming right now, as it offers little benefit compared to three cores. $99.

* Phenom II X2 BE. Very fast; much faster than the Athlon II X4, even performing quite respectably compared to Intel's i5. But, only two cores means its not going to be quite so nice for multitasking, and some games will do noticably better having a 3rd core. $99.

* Athlon II X3. Gaming performance is good, comparable to the XP4 yet costs $10-20 less depending on which one I went with. $79-89.

What fun! On top of that, all these are AM3 socket CPU's, so (at least according to the current roadmap/plans) I would be able to use AMD's Bulldozer CPU's come 2010-2011. So, really its a matter of deciding which of three good options would work best for me.

What's fantastic is they'd all be significant upgrades for me, give me better future options, and would be cheaper than my computer was back in 2006 when I bought it (around half as much)! It would improve all my current games and applications (especially the multi-core friendly Adobe Premiere Elements 4 and FRAPS), and I'd even be able to give my current computer to a teacher friend of mine.

I love technology. Even when it drives me crazy. Decisions, decisions! ;)

edit: Right now I've specced things out on Newegg...

Athlon II X3 $562.92 ($148.01 cheaper than an i5 system)

Athlon II X4 or Phenom II X2 $584.93 ($126 cheaper than an i5 system)

Intel (i5) system $710.93