Well, the price of my PS3 - $500CDN latelast summer when I was running around trying to score a Metal Gear Solid bundle.

It's interesting to see the price of technology fall, as the last computer I built back in 2001 cost me about $1700CDN, which is similar in price to the laptop I bought three or four years ago. Now, for $500 I can put together something that's not spectacular, but surprisingly competent, and more than capable of playing current (and future) games, most of them at my monitor's native resolution.

Oh yeah, remember the monitor I bought the other month? It's now become a shared monitor as my girlfriend's old computer moves on to her sister and we start sharing this new one and my old laptop. Naturally, I want to use this computer more as it's better for gaming, even if the screen resolution is a slight drop (from 1920x1200 on my laptop to 1920x1080 on the SX2210).

So what did $500 buy me?

-AMD X2 7750 Black (haven't overclocked yet, if I will I doubt I'll bring it up to 3Ghz)
-Middling Gigabyte motherboard sans Crossfire, because two videocards is nuts
-4GB DDR2
-512MBSapphire Radeon4830
-1TB Western Digital drive
-Samsung DVD burner
-Antec Sonata III case

I stuck the 64bit release candidate of Windows 7 on there to cut costs for now(plus, it's awesome), and the entire thing is plenty fast enough to run every game I own at the monitor's native resolution with details cranked. I have no complaints.

My only real gripe is that it looks like a $500 PC inside - although I'm not about to buy a fancy CPU cooler and fan to create the illusion of something more.