Firstly, I haven’t forgotten those handy folk among you who build your own PCs, including Gaming PCs. My expertise is in software - when it comes to hardware the most complicated thing I have done is install a second hard drive. I salute those who can build a PC or take one apart, diagnose it, and put it together again.

For a Build Your Own Box person, an Antec Three Hundred Gaming Case Midsize Tower is probably a good starting point.

The gaming PC featured today is so exclusive it is not listed on Pricegrabber.com. Actually, the reason is more to do with the fact that this gaming PC is not sold through retail outlets, only from the maker’s website. They are also among the most expensive Gaming PCs around. I refer of course to the Falcon Northwest Mach V (Intel Core i7-965 Extreme Edition). Falcon Midwest can be found here. For pictures of the Mach V, see the review here on Engadget.com.

I tried configuring a Falcon Northwest Mach V gaming desktop on the Falcon Midwest website. A “Budget” Mach V starts at about $2,600, and the midway “Bang for the Buck” system at $3,200, and the “Bragging Rights” Mach V starts at $11,000. Starts at is a relative term, as the cost can go down depending on your configuration choices. I reconfigured this by changing the SSDs (Solid State Disks) to a pair of raid 0 Hard drives and a 1 Terabyte drive (wow!) and some other minor changes and brought the price down to $8,100. The hardware techs I mentioned above could probably build their own machines with similar specs for a fraction of these prices.