My rig is not a particularly modern one. Suffice it to say that it strains a bit when running Far Cry on high settings, and that the mean release date of my games is two or three years old. I use my computer to work and play, and since I have the disk space, I set it up in a novel way -at least for me. I have two XP installs on it, and Ubuntu Linux. Plus, other partitions are there for my music collection, or if I need to test other operating systems, such as Vista, Open Solaris, *BSD or the like. I study, in case you wondered, Software Engineering. The setup is a bit inefficient to update (I download some patches twice), but it allows me to keep separated games and work. One setup has Visual Studio, Eclipse, and many other tools I program with; the other is loaded with games. The main other advantages are that the Windows registries get less cluttered, and that defragmentation is faster. And also, that, should I ever decide to erase my games partition and reinstall, the work one would be unaffected. I think the extra work is acceptable.