How much would a gaming PC cost?

How much does a decent gaming PC cost?

• I'm thinking of buying a PC to run Microsoft Flight Simulator. It's been a long time since I've dealt with Windows machines. What are reasonable gaming CPUs selling for these days? Any tips on which one to get?

• Answer:

  It is not possible to give a cost of "a gaming PC". Some gamers will spend thousands of dollars just to have the latest GPU or a flash drive, while some more moderate gamers will pay no more than 600-700 dollars). If you need a PC just for a single game, you may want to look at http://www.microsoft.com/games/flightsimulatorx/product_info.html. This will help to determine the cost of the overall machine. In the case of Flight Simulator X, probably a very basic machine (400 dollars) will be enough. Now, if you need it to play several games, it will heavily depend on the games themselves. Some very recent and hardware-intensive games (like Crysis in 2009) will require expensive hardware and especially GPU, whereas other games will not. You may also take in account that if you want to play the games which will be released this year or the next year without upgrading your PC, you should in more expensive components.