i7 for gaming. Laffo. AMD is definitely not a no-no. Phenom II 945/955s are beastly processors if you're looking for price/performance. 6870 is also a top-notch GPU for the money. Faster than a 5850 which is more than good enough for almost anyone. i7 is a workstation processor. i5 is way more than good enough for gaming, not even kidding. I have a 760 (1156) and it destroys almost everything out there right now. I think an i7 would be a waste of money that could be used on faster RAM, GPU, so on. Also, you really do not need 8GB of RAM unless you're video editing and playing Crysis at the same time. Seriously. I have 4GB and I've not seen it come close to maxing out. 4GB of fast RAM is far more than good enough for playing games. Just a word of warning that Sandy Bridge motherboards are really not that great from what I've been hearing about them so keep that in mind if you're going 1155. BF3 recommended (based on its engine): Recommended System Requirements Processor: Quadcore Processor Memory: 4 GB Hard Drive: 15 GB for Digital Version, 10 GB for Disc Version Video Memory: 512 MB Sound Card: DirectX Compatible DirectX: 11 Keyboard and Mouse DVD Rom Drive Good components which fulfil these criteria will be more than enough. It's preferable to get a 1GB graphics card so you have more space for high-resolution textures but it's hard to find an enthusiast GPU without 1GB of memory these days. 4GB of 1333/1600MHz RAM will be fine, i5 2500k will be fine. It might even be overkill depending on this guy's screen resolution... But yeah, the "top-end" components definitely don't give you the best price/performance at all. I'm sorry for sounding like an [wagon] but I can't stand it when I see $1500 "gaming" builds when a gaming PC should cost nowhere near that much. You could probably get something for $700-$900 which will destroy BF3 and I'm willing to give you a hand doing so, unless you're set on getting what's been posted. I don't really think it's necessary but it's your call, dude. Obviously a build like that will be nothing short of exceptional but then you'd need to get a suitably high-resolution monitor to really push your hardware enough to get your money's worth out of it. No use spending $1500 on a nuclear reactor and playing on your 10 year old 15" CRT.