I used to build my own machines. I took great pride of getting the last clock cycle of power out of them. To get one more frame per second out of them.  Then I got married, had kids, and now just am happy to be able to play games at all let alone overlocking my video card or purchasing a premium motherboard.

So when Half-Life 2 came out, I decided to get a new computer. One that was pretty well set up for gaming. I haven't played HL2 yet because I want to experience it in its maximum visual glory. So what did I do? I bought a Dell.

Here are the specs:

Now, some of this stuff I'll end up putting onto other machines.  The monitor won't do of course. But I can bring it to work.  And yea, maybe I should have gotten 4 gigs of RAM but I decided that I didn't need it and could always add it later if I really had to have it.  But this should be adequate to play HL2.