I'm running an i7-920 (original quad core baby) with 6GB DDR3. I bet if I got another 4890 in SLI, 6GB more DDR3 and an SSD drive (all three for under $250 I bet) I could game on this machine for another 1-2 years at high quality and with good framerates, I'll be missing out on all the new DirectX/software technologies though.