Need help from someone PC-literate.

[Astonishing X-Fan]

Okay, so I want to get a new desktop PC for gaming purposes.

However, the most high-end ones I can find are a little out of my price range at the moment.

What I'm thinking of doing is buying a cheaper PC right now, and then upgrading the video card in about a month or so.

So, I did some shopping, and I was wondering if this would be considered a decent PC...

Processor Type AMD Phenom 9500 Quad-Core
Processor Speed 2.2GHz
RAM 3GB PC2-5300 DDR2 SDRAM
Hard Drive 400GB 7200RPM SATA
Optical Drives 16X Dual-Layer DVD Burner w/ LightScribe
Graphics Card NVIDIA GeForce 8500 GT

Is this a good processor for new games? 3 gigs of RAM seems like good enough.

I don't really quite understand the whole processor speed stuff. Like say a game box says I need equivalent to a P4 3.2 Ghz or a duo-core 2.4 ghz...would a quad-core 2.2 ghz do the job? What exactly is a 2.2 ghz quad core about equivalent to in single and duo-core processors?

Like if I later installed a high-end video card, would this PC then be able to compentantly run stuff like Call of Duty 4 and Crysis at pretty good settings?

And as far as the graphics card that comes with it...is it at least good enough to run the newer games for now, even if I have to turn the settings down? So I can at least play some stuff while I save up for a new vid card?

Any help would be appreciated.

[Agent Helix]

That's fine. Don't bother with Crysis though, it's a boring game. The GeForce card is fine for right now.

[Astonishing X-Fan]

I was just using Crysis as an example, really, as it's one of the most demanding games out there that I know of.

So the processor is good? And the video card it comes with is pretty decent for now? The PC is $899 Canadian, which seems like a good price. Thinking of picking it up today.

[The Shelf]

Just make sure your PC has PCI Express. I built my PC expecting to be able to upgrade it over time, and PCI Express came out immediately after I built it. Needless to say, that pretty much put a stop to any graphics upgrades I wanted to make. Definitely a good idea to pay attention to new technologies that are coming out in the coming years.