» Mon Mar 14, 2011 9:55 pm
I ran OB (and still run heavily modded MW) on a "mongrel" PC that I've been gradually updating since the 1980s. I think the only "original" part left is the power cord. By the time Skyrim comes out, a quarter of it won't be the same as what I'm using now, which is about the fastest of the AMD single-core processors from about 2 years ago. Since neither game (or anything else I ran until very recently) supported dual-cores, there was no advantage to getting one. The MB supports a quad, though, so I'll probably drop another processor in it this summer, and perhaps another video card.
Oh, total "price" for the setup was probably in the $5-600 range at the time for all the pieces, plus "do-it-yourself" labor rates.....$0. Another $200 should bring it up to current specs for another year or two (it seems to cost $100-200 per year to stay semi-current), and it should still run a few "golden oldie" 20+year-old DOS games that I still play on rare occasions, with a bit of fiddling (who needs "graphics" if the gameplay is great?). Compare that to the cost of a console, which you have to replace completely every so many years, and which obsoletes half of your game collection, and there's not that much difference in cost over the long haul, as long as you can do the upgrades yourself.