GAMER LOUNGE 20XX (NO CASUALS!!)

[Koh]

I'm not informed enough about Steam's hardware to comment on that, but I can say putting $1,000 on a gaming PC now will ensure you don't have to upgrade that thing for least least 5 years. The laptop I've been using for the past 6 years, I dumped on $1,000 myself with the intent of gaming, with these specs:

-6 GB of RAM
-2 GHz AMD Phenom II N930 Quad-Core Processor
-AMD M880G with ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4250
-Windows 7

I've been able to run most things fine, though 3D things with heavy detail and large draw distance like TERA, or voxel-based games with questionable optimization like Cube World, I've had to turn down a bit to regain full FPS, and not have just under 30 FPS or under 60 FPS if that was the games' standard.

Of course this is 6 year old hardware, and a laptop at that (I go for laptops so I can take it wherever) so $1,000 now would no doubt get you something better, in both the laptop and desktop departments, that will last you for some time to come. The most important specs you need to pay attention to are: RAM (if you get about 16 GB of RAM, you should never have to upgrade for at least 10 years), Processor ( 3 GHz+ Dual-Core will do fine; Quad-Core isn't using all the cores at this point yet for most things), and a decent graphics card (I'm hearing Nvidia is the way to go, but this is probably a tossup with another big name brand as well).