Bingo. And there's now some pretty fierce competition between Nvidia and AMD again, so you can often catch some pretty good deals on a GPU or a combo if you pay

Bingo. And there's now some pretty fierce competition between Nvidia and AMD again, so you can often catch some pretty good deals on a GPU or a combo if you pay attention. I still use an AMD processor on my gaming/development rig, because upgrading to a better Intel CPU would have cost me nearly twice as much (I already had an AMD motherboard, so that helped). I don't notice a bottleneck in most games. I think the best strategy is to get mid-range components and just upgrade more often. You get way more bang for your buck, and you can always sell the old components on eBay or whatever.