I often feel like the most important question when looking at specs is what sort of games are you playing (or want to be playing) on your PC? I have to admit I do fairly frequent upgrades, I do not own any consoles so my PC is my sole 'gaming device'. I also play pretty demanding games overall and like to bump up the settings a lot (the Total War games and some of the newer next-gen ports are hitting stuff like VRAM pretty hard)

Over the last year I have replaced pretty much every component in my PC but I am now hoping it will last a few years (i5 4670K, 16GB RAM and an AMD 280X). Before that my PC was around 3-4 years old and while still decent it was starting to feel a bit sluggish to me in certain games.

Building a Mini-ITX system sounds great and certainly seems to be the way things are going at the moment.

My PC is approximately 5+ years old now and still chugging along fairly well. No consoles for me, so all my gaming is done on my trusty old  PC.

Civ V late game crashes frequently but is still playable with all graphics set to low and playing against only 4 or 5 other Civs on small to medium maps sizes. Not the epic gaming experience I must admit but still highly enjoyable. It's probably the most cpu intensive game installed on my machine I think.

I'll probably buy a new computer sometime after the new year I would imagine. Besides, looking forward to playing GalCiv III! 

(Don't laugh too hard)

Dell Inspiron 530

(CPU) Intel Core 2 Duo/E8300 @ 2.83 GHz

Memory (RAM) 4 GB

Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit Operating System

(Video) ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT

It still plays a lot of older games (mostly strategy) without even a hiccup... so there.

I built my PC in 2009. Still running great.

i7 860
8GB RAM
GTX 260

I don't see any reason to upgrade for the next couple of years.

Dunno I usually try to keep a lot of core components the same (mobo/cpu) while upgrading my memory and GPU up until ti's practical. I generally upgrade when the next memory cycle comes around. Though I suspect a lot of DX10 hold outs will need to upgrade to DX11 as that becomes more and more mainstream.

lol, why?

And in a couple of years when the games that require DX11 are on sale I might consider upgrading at that point. I've lost interest in paying 50+ for a game that sales out for half that in a year.

7+ years here for my main rig:

System Information

------------------
Operating System: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit (6.1, Build 7601) Service Pack 1
System Model: EVGA 132-YW-E178-FTW
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q9550 @ 2.83GHz (4 CPUs), ~2.8GHz
Memory: 8192MB RAM
HDD1: Samsung 840 Pro 512GB SSD
HDD2: Seagate 1TB Solid State Hybrid Drive (ST1000LM014)
ODD: Panasonic UJ240 6x Blu-ray Burner BD-RE/8x DVD±RW DL

Display Devices

---------------
Card name: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470
Display Memory: 4048 MB
Current Mode: 2560 x 1080 (32 bit) (60Hz)
Monitor Model: ASUS PB298
Native Mode: 2560 x 1080(p) (59.978Hz)
Output Type: HDMI

I do have another system that I am in the works of getting up as a replacement (currently down for LC improvements). That one is based on a EVGA 270-WS-W555-A2 (Classified SR-2) with 2 Intel X5650's, 24GB ECC RAM, and 3 780's.

My Main/Gaming Computer 1> year old

AMD FX 9370 8 CORE CPU

POWERCOLOR AMD R9270X GPU 2GB

16 GB MEMORY

HDD 3 TB (Split into 3 partitions)

Dual Monitors

Win 7 Pro 64 bit

The computer this replaced was 9 +

Intel dual core (don't remember specs)

4 GB MEMORY

Integrated GPU

500 GB HDD

Win XP upgraded to Win 7 Home 32 bit (but the computer could have supported 64 bit)

Just upgraded my work/gaming PC. The last one lasted about 4 years, but what do you expect from a laptop

Quoting Borg999,

reply 18

Quoting parrottmath,

reply 17

Just upgraded my work/gaming PC. The last one lasted about 4 years, but what do you expect from a laptop

I haven't looked into it in a very long time, but you can play decent games on a laptop without upgrading the graphics card and RAM nowadays, or are out of the box, middle of the road, laptops sufficient?

They are, but since I work and game on that PC daily it has taken a beating. Currently it is suffering from a cooling problems and lowers the performance on a lot of games. It still works well for many of the games I play, but it just doesn't have the staying power it once did.

The upgrade is mostly for my other home PC which has been around for about 9+ years. But when I finally convinced the wife to upgrade that computer, I might as well make it a better gaming computer

If I can figure out a cheap and sure way to keep my laptop cool, I could still run many of the games that are coming out (at medium / low settings)

I used to build a bleeding edge box every 6 months just to build it, but lifestyle changes and other time constraints have resulted in not starting any new games in almost 6 years.

AN8 SLI-32 Deluxe

AMD Phenom(tm)II X6 Core Processor 3.00GHz

8.00 Gigabyte Ram

(2X) Western Digital Raptor 10,000 RPM 76gig (RAID-0)

(2X) GTX 8800 Graphics Cards (Still amazing benchmarks)

Windows 7 64 Bit Ultimate

My laptop is 2 years old, but it wasnt really "top of the line" from the get go. It is now becoming hard to play newer games.

My last rig was a 3 year old i5 quad core 3 gig system with 6 gigs of ram, and a gforce 250gt 2 gig video card. It is still running. I just dont have it any more. It was handed down to my son. Otherwise i probably would still be using it, and upgrading it. The funny thing is my laptop has almost exactly the same specs as my old desktop. Except a has crappy intel GPU.

The rig i built before lasted me almost 6 years before it became beyond obsolete.

I'm at 5 years, I've added some ram and a new video card, but that's it.  Oh, and went form windows V to 7.  Was a cheap Dell and still plays new games fine.