I've had my current computer for about five years now. Which is to say its exterior has remained largely unchanged. If you were to look inside, however, you'd discover a completely different machine from what it used to be when I picked it up.

It was a media-oriented Packard Bell model, something built for me, and it was as stock-y as they came. Let's not even mention Alienware, this thing was built for Italian mainstream consumers who weren't into gaming. Hell, PC gaming in Italy is largely a phantom market today. But that's another topic.

Where am I going with this? Well, my new PC was fast, but its GPU was weak and it soon turned out that it was being hard pressed to perform well with the new generations of games. So one day my faithful geforce 6300 rendered its last texture and gave out on me. Short on funds, I replaced it with a 7300. Not much better, but it served its purpose. It ran Crysis on medium settings and Modern Warfare on high, and that was admirable for such an underdog of a graphics card. Then came Bioshock and Mass Effect and it became clear to me I'd have to upgrade or get a console. Consoles were expensive, so it had to be the upgrade.

I'm using an 9800 GT now and it's clobbering my games. It doesn't just render them, it smacks them over the head with a club, carries them into its cave of doom and turns them into its slaves.

Over the years I made other changes. Fans, harddrives, power supply units, motherboards, you name it. There are only two pieces of original hardware left, my old Pentium IV, which is now close to death, though it served me admirably, and a stick of RAM.

Now I am going to replace those too, and the original will be gone forever.

How much money did I put into this over the years? Plenty, definitely enough to buy myself a console. But there's a difference here, a vital difference. I'm not going into a discussion about how PCs are better than consoles here, I'm only illustrating a key feature of PC gaming.

Fact: if you are a dedicated PC gamer than you must recognize that your PC is like your car. You fine tune it every chance you get. You give it a name and new toys any time you can. You love it. It's like your WoW character. It just keeps getting bigger and stronger and with better gear, until you realize you couldn't trade it for anything. Because it's yours, not because you paid for it or because you have a receipt with your name it, but because you built it. If you wanted to, you could pick it apart and organize every piece of hardware autobiographically.

That is the beauty of being a PC gamer. Your machine is like a box you can open and fine tune. Is your system going a little slower? Perhaps you should clear out the dust. Fan a little too loud? Change it. Core temperature too high? Look into that cool new watercooling system.

Consoles are great gaming platforms, they specialize in it. Chances are you won't have any headaches about compatibility, installation, low frame-rate and the whole host of problems that can crop up. But consoles are closed systems. You get one and it lasts you a while and then you have to get a new one if you want to try the new games.

PC gamers on the other hand live in a continuum of upgrades. If you've got enough spare cash lying around you can build a system that will last you many years into the future. If you don't, just take it a step at a time. It might turn out to be more expensive in the long run, it might even make less sense, but that's how it is. Our hardware is ours. We make it ours. And it is a thing of beauty.