Wake up and smell your wallet

A few months ago, I got something called a VFD (vaccuum flourescent display). This thing displays live everything in my computer - CPU usage, RAM usage, PF usage, temperatures, fan speeds, network usage, voltages, etc. This thing is great. In fact, its probably the greatest money saver I ever got. Other than video card, I don't need to improve my system nearly at all and I have what many of you would consider a terrible gaming computer. Heres what I have:

Socket 939 AMD Opteron 180 (equivilant to 4800+ X2)
2 GB DDR1 RAM
Windows XP Pro SP2
Nvidia 7900GT KO (no, I don't mean OC)

I play games such as COD4 at nearly full detail. My video card prevents me from going at max but it looks good enough as it is. Checking the VFD as I play the game, CPU never goes above 89%. It is usually at 80%. RAM usage stays below 60%. CPU temperature stays below 50C.

I ran a demo of Crysis with medium-high (very high is disabled) settings. Even with physics at high, to my surprise, nothing was very different.
I also tried a demo of Bioshock. That game reached the 90s for CPU usage but RAM usage was below 40%.

What I'm trying to say is people are getting more than enough power than they need. They gloat saying "Oh yeah I have a 2.8GHz quad core Intel with water cooling, 1000W power supply, 1GB of video memory, and 3GB of RAM with heat spreader". Good job hotshot, you just spent at LEAST $1000 more than you'll ever use. Even the best looking games can work perfectly fine on hardware that is 2 generations old.

Video is now the new thing you have to keep focus on. Save your money, get dual core, stick with DDR2 (RAM speeds don't noticably affect gameplay, only loading times), don't get cooling for your RAM (seriously, they would almost never overheat on you), and spend this extra money on a nice video card or 2. For my PC, all I need is any 8800 and I should be able to play COD4 at full detail. Keep in mind that 1GB of VRAM isn't necessary either. 512 ATM should be plenty for any game.

Lets not make our 500W+ gaming computers into a server here. If you want bragging rights due to 3DMark then fine, go waste your money. Oh and BTW, there are "hacks" to XP so you can use DX10 on it.