What specs should I use for a Windows-based PC that's suitable for gaming?

if you are going to get a gaming PC, make sure to also get a good soundcard

your specs are more than enough to play most games. If you are going to get your pc mostly for gaming, you might want to try a Dell XPS / Alienware or Falcon Northwest

As for paying, Dell has some good payment plan

Thanks, Mirza. I completely forgot about the sound card!

I'd consider the sound card last if you're building a Vista machine. I've read that the OS does the bulk of the audio processing, and that it can't be changed.

Are you getting the parts separately and putting it together yourself or are you buying a built system?
You probably won’t need a separate soundcard. Your motherboard and vista will take care of it. Just check in the back of the case (if its prebuilt) or check the motherboard (if your making it) to see if its got all the jacks for 5.1 or whatever you want.

Thirdly, DO NOT BUY FROM ALIENWARE. They are crap, have horrible service, and you will be paying at least 2x as much its worth. Take it from me, one who has owned an alienware. I didn’t know what I was doing, overpaid hardcore, and bought an extra $300 warranty that didn’t cover any of the slew of problems I had.
Personally, I recommend building your own system. If you know what your doing, you’ll get a great system for you and save over a pre-built system that comes loaded with software you don’t need and bogs your system down.
All of your specs look good except 2 things. First, the memory speed of your RAM is verrrry important. Make sure you get 800 Mhz or higher. 800 will do you just fine, but you do not want to go any lower. (If your building your own system, make sure you get a dual channel kit) Secondly, that cpu is fine, but I’d recommend a small upgrade now so you won’t have to in the near future. Not a big deal if your trying to save money and don’t want to upgrade though, that will do you fine for the games you want.
The amount of memory isn’t the only thing to consider on the videocard. Core and memory speeds are very important. Also, they recently came out with PCIE 2.0 and some cards can take advantage of that if both your motherboard and videocard are capable.
With the specs you have listed now, I would guess less than $800 if I were building it myself.

Thanks for being so specific with these tips. 8—)

If you want to make it last longer, I would recommend getting a slightly faster CPU, or a Quad core one at the same rate. Sure you’ll spend more money now, but two to three years you might be grateful you did. That is, if you can afford it now, and don’t want the hassle of upgrading. Make sure you get a DVD-rom or burner.

Oh, and don’t skimp on the motherboard. The cheapest ones are the ones most likely to break in a year or two. Asus and Gigabyte and Soyo have been pretty good to me, I’m sure there are others.

If you do indeed go the build your own path, make sure that you get a good name brand board, like Abit or ASUS. Also you’ll want to get low latency RAM, that’ll give you a nice boost in speed right off the bat. I’d also go with a SATA 3Gb/s drive. It’s sustained data rate is better than a regular SATA burst rate, and they’re cheap nowadays, you can get a 1TB drive with a 32MB buffer for under $200. Aside from that, feel free to ask.

Total price I usually spend around $1k for parts, including Windows. That’ll get you a nice rig that will last for another 3–4 years.

My current rig (sorry prices are in UK £‘s)

Antec twelve hundred case £100
Be quiet! Dark Power PSU £100
Asus P5K premium Wifi-AP motherboard £100
Intel Core2 Quad Q6600 2.4Ghz £116
OCZ Reaper PC2–8500 1066 MHZ 4Gb RAM £80
Tuniq Tower 120 CPU cooler £35
Sapphire Radeon HD4870 512Mb £180
Creative x-fi Xtreme Gamer £50
Samsung spinpoint 750Gb Hard disk £50
DVD drive £15

I would also recommend you build your own system. It works out cheaper so you can spend more on components and isn’t actually that hard to do.

For gaming you should consider your components in this order
Graphics card
Processor
Ram
Motherboard
soundcard

The graphics card will make is the single biggest difference to your gaming performance and so where you will need to invest the most money. It’s not just about the amount of ram on the graphics card – it’s the whole architecture and the type of ram. For example the Dell 1525 and Dell 1530 both use the same graphics card – the 8600GT but one has ddr2 ram and the other has DDR3 ram and there is a 20–30% difference in gaming performance. Graphics cards now have up to DDR5 but only the very top end. Aim for a mid-top end card to get the most bang for your buck. A good card now is the 9800GTX or the 8800 GT which you can pick up for about £150 / £90 respectively (and maybe less if you shop around).

Next will be the processor, the one you described won’t set the world on fire but should be capable of playing most games well when backed by a decent graphics card. With Core 2 extreme and quad core becoming very affordable might want to conider those too. Also check not just the speed but also the cache. A good amount of L2 cache makes a big difference – aim for at least 512kb.

Next the ram. You will want at least 2gb and maybe 4gb. Whichever you choose get them in 2 seperate identical sticks so you can take advantage of dual channel memory. Again the speed of the ram is important – the faster the better. DDR2 is on the way out so you have to decide whether to get a cheap/bargain on DDR2 or go cutting edge with faster ram. I’d recommend 2×2GB ram from crucial or if you want to really fly by some corsair gaming ram.

Motherboard. Once you’ve chosen your Graphics, processor and ram it should really narrow down your choice of motherboard. It will need to support all the other components. Buy from a good brand like Asus or Gigabyte. Avoid cowboys like AsRock. MSi is a bit hit and miss.

Soundcard I am not really that fussed about and even the onboard sound from good motherboards is not bad. However, you can’t go wrong with a good creative labs card.

Hard drive – if you have lots of cash get a solid state drive – unbeatable performance but not much capacity for your money. Otherwise get a SATAII drive with 7200rpm or better.

You should be able to build a decent rig with what I described for under £600.

My 2 cents on kullervo’s advice…
Ram doesn’t really restrict any of your hardware choices. Deciding between DDR2 and DDR3 is really the only choice (unless you want really fast 1200Mhz ram, not many motherboards support it) and DDR3 is really expensive and overpriced last I checked. Anyway for that reason, I would put motherboard before ram. The motherboard does restrict many of your other hardware choices.
From reading reviews it seems solid state drives don’t have much performance boost, but still have no moving parts so don’t die nearly as often.
I like the brands kullervo reccomended. I would add evga. great products and customer service.

At the moment I reckon you are better off with ATI Radeon graphics card. Both the HD4050 and 4070 are faster and better value for money than Nvidia products.

The problem with Ati is they dont work as hard as Nvidia on drivers. With stock drivers (the ones that come on a disc with the card) an Ati card may out perform an equivalent Nvidia in benchmarks. However, as Nvidia release regular driver updates that squeeze significant performance boosts from their hardware you may find the same cards will come out with Nvidia on top when both use the latest drivers. That been said agree you should consider the ATI cards.
@lightminutesaway i mentioned ram above motherboard as this will have a greater affect on performance than motherboad choice not that it will affect motherboard selection much. Also solid state is vastly better for gaming not have as fast sequential write speeds as some SATA II drives but it has near instant access times so while transferring a folder of photos wont be as quick, random access tasks such as needed for gaming will be significantly faster.

For gaming I would highly recommend getting 4GB of ram or more. It helps a lot if you plan to run Vista of any kind and doesn’t hurt on anything else. Make sure your OS of choice is 64bit, because anything less will not see more then 3GB of ram and will not use a multicore processor efficiently.

@tehrani625 I think the speed an quality of ram is more important than quantity. Of course more is good but considering the highest recorded benchmarks on 3Dmark’s website were on rigs with just 2gb of ram it shows that having 4GB isn’t that big a deal. I recently upgraded to 4GB myself and noticed no performance improvement in games other than slightly faster loading times.

Drug store specs with a +5 magnification factor. You’ll see everything very well.