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Gaming PCs: How much is too much?

PC games are still alive and well, but after reviewing a $5,000 gaming desktop and a $2,000 gaming laptop, we have to ask if anyone is actually buying these pricey rigs.

Dan Ackerman Editorial Director / Computers and Gaming
Dan Ackerman leads CNET's coverage of computers and gaming hardware. A New York native and former radio DJ, he's also a regular TV talking head and the author of "The Tetris Effect" (Hachette/PublicAffairs), a non-fiction gaming and business history book that has earned rave reviews from the New York Times, Fortune, LA Review of Books, and many other publications. "Upends the standard Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs/Mark Zuckerberg technology-creation myth... the story shines." -- The New York Times
Expertise I've been testing and reviewing computer and gaming hardware for over 20 years, covering every console launch since the Dreamcast and every MacBook...ever. Credentials
  • Author of the award-winning, NY Times-reviewed nonfiction book The Tetris Effect; Longtime consumer technology expert for CBS Mornings
Rich Brown Former Senior Editorial Director - Home and Wellness
Rich was the editorial lead for CNET's Home and Wellness sections, based in Louisville, Kentucky. Before moving to Louisville in 2013, Rich ran CNET's desktop computer review section for 10 years in New York City. He has worked as a tech journalist since 1994, covering everything from 3D printing to Z-Wave smart locks.
Expertise Smart home, Windows PCs, cooking (sometimes), woodworking tools (getting there...)
Dan Ackerman
Rich Brown
2 min read

Low-cost ultraportable laptops and family-friendly all-in-one desktops are a common sight in the CNET Labs; massive gaming rigs less so.

It's gotten to the point now that when one of these high-end systems appears, someone in the office always asks, "Does anyone even buy these things any more?"

PC gaming, while not dead, is not the arms race it was more than five years ago, as only a handful of 2011 games (Battlefield 3, The Witcher 2) are designed to really push PC hardware.

Game publishers know they need to create games that can play on a wide variety of systems, and much of the growth in PC gaming comes from social and casual games that run on nearly any hardware, and predating that, MMOs such as World of Warcraft that also had forgiving system requirements.

Consumers are now choosing laptops over desktops by a wider-than-ever margin (Forrester research shows the desktop slice of the overall PC pie dropping from 38 percent in 2009 to a projected 27 percent for 2011), meaning the ability to swap out video cards and CPUs is gone for most PC users.

Building a custom desktop PC yourself remains a niche market, although interestingly, shipments of GPUs are up overall, according to Jon Peddie Research.

On top of that, PC gaming options now include easy-to-run vintage games from GOG.com and other; OnLive, a streaming-game service that works on nearly any PC; and, of course, Facebook is now the largest gaming platform in history.

That's not to say we don't marvel over some of the cool hardware that comes our way. We recently reviewed the desktop, with an overclocked 4.4GHz Intel Core i7-3930K CPU and three Nvidia GeForce GTX 570 video cards. However, at $4,995, it's not exactly an impulse purchase.

On the laptop side, our latest gaming laptop review is the . For $2,000, you get a 2GHz Intel Core i7-2630QM CPU and Nvidia GeForce GTX 560M--both good, but not top-of-the-line parts, but also a whopping 16GB of RAM (easy enough to find in desktops, but rare for laptops). Another 2011 gaming laptop, the , has an overclocked CPU and GPU, again extra-rare for laptops, but costs $3,600.

Our question to you is: how much is too much to pay for a gaming laptop or desktop? Especially when nearly all the most popular games are also available on $200-$300 living room consoles, or else are at least playable on sub-$1,000 PC hardware.

Vote in our poll, or leave further comments below.