So, today I get a beast

For about 1 year now, my old desktop has been running slow. I can't blame it, because it runs on an AMD Athlon II X3 and GTX 460. The setup is pretty good, at least good enough to play most games I have on 1440p maxed out. But it can't run high demand games like crysis 3 and battlefield 4. So today, after some consideration, I picked up an HP Phoenix from Craigslist. The guy who sold me this machine is a graphic designer, and he wants to go mobile now. The desktop is previous generation from last year, running on an i7 3770 with 12 GB RAM and 2 TB HDD. He added a GTX 680 with Samsung SSD. Boot time is less than 10 sec, wake up time is 3 seconds. The PC runs cool and quiet even on heavy load, that's why I love HP Phoenix so much. Good build and quality without costing an arm and a leg. Total price? $700 cash.

Result? Absolutely no stuttering on BF4 or whatsoever. I play on 1440p, everything maxed out and get about 60 FPS in all maps. Same thing on Crysis 3, almost everything is maxed. I usually don't set AA max because it will hit the FPS hard and I don't quite see any real difference anyway. Xenoblade runs smoothly on Dolphin (before it runs with tons of hiccups on the GTX 460). Consider that the card alone cost $500 on 1st release (the price now should be about $300 something), and the desktop could cost up to $800 refurbished on ebay without all the extras (SSD is about $100 more). I have seen people sold the same setup for double the price before. I could say I'm quite lucky this time.