Your dream system under $1000

[Bootsiuv]

Hello fellow .orgers.

I've come here because I've begun the initial planning for the upcoming year of what I'm sure will be awesome PC games (As a PC GAMER subscriber, I'm feeling pretty good about PC gaming for 2008), and I have to decide if I should keep my current system and upgrade, or buy an all new rig.

I'm looking forward to playing games like Crysis and Hellgate: London, and I want a machine which is capable of doing it to at least a playable degree.

My only caveat....I only have access to $1000 for the upgrade or new rig.

My current rig is something of a joke between me and my friends. It's an E-Machines for one thing, which I've heard bad things about. I bought it in 2004 for $500 but have upgraded the Ram, video card, and sound card a few times already.

My latest acquisition is a VisionTek Radeon 1550X 256 MB video card. At $90, I think it was a great buy. Every game I own is now on high settings, but I'm sure the games of the future won't pan out the same way. As far as other important stats, it's a Celeron 2.7 GHZ with 768 MB of ram. Is the processor worth keeping for another year or two? Will a 512 MB video card and a gig of good ram allow me to play games like World in Conflict and Hellgate: London seamlessly? I've heard bad things about Celerons, so I thought I would ask the experts.

Anyways, my real question is as follows: If you had $1000 to build a "dream machine" (and I use that term loosely, as a real dream rig is $3000-7000 and I'm aware of that), what would you buy? Would you hang onto the Celeron 2.7 GHZ or does that lack the muscle to play the games of next year?

One last thing to remember though, is that a new computer will automatically give me Vista and DX10, whereas, if I keep my old rig, I'll be buying Vista the old fashioned way, and it isn't cheap. DX10 looks well worth it for a hardcore gamer like me though.


Sorry for the long-winded post.

Thanks for your time.

Bootsiuv