More powerful hardware is out of his/her budget. It will easily play games at high settings, sure my monitor is only 1440x900, but even on my budget build, i can play on high settings without lag. Asus is weird in customer service sometimes, and MSI - i don't know if they've changed to better components yet - but their components are/used-to-be of cheap quality. Yeah. My Athlon X2 7750 and 8800GTS can still run most things on high at 1280x1024. It starts to struggle at about 1680x1050 (comfortable on medium) but anything above that needs to be set to a mixture of medium/low settings for it to run well and still look relatively alright. It's kind of amazing how older hardware is still good considering all the advances since I built this. Yeah, with ASUS you're taking a bit of a gamble (as I've learned) but the coolers and performance figures are quite nice on them. The newer MSi cards are pretty good quality, and again, they have really nice coolers and performance. I've never dealt with HIS and the only dedicated ATi GPU brand I've used is Sapphire, again, fairly good but not really amazing. Also, seconding Dell monitors being great. When this one gives up, I think I'll get a Dell one.