i used to use a 4 core 3ghz amd with 16gigs ram and 2 terabytes of drive space and an nvidia 640
then my dad (who is an engineer with a rather large cpu design company that i cannot name) realized what i do for a living and decided to build me a new computer
the specs on the new one
a heavy duty workstation motherboard, 12 core intel 4ghz processor, 64 gigs of corsair ddr4 ram, 2x 512 gig solid state drives, 2x 1 terabyte standard hard drives, a pair of nics that work in tandem, and a pair of nvidia gtx 770s setup in sli
both graphics cards, the processor, and the ram are all setup with a custom liquid cooling system and overclocked beyond their factory specs (the specs i posted are factory, am at work at the moment so i can't check stats on them currently)
i have no idea how much he spent on the parts for it, i'd wager it's well over 3k
as a performance test, i ran skyrim, with all the hd mods i could find, on ultra, with bookmark demon, amr and captcha sniper running, and about 3 firefox windows with 20 tabs open on each, while watching an anime on the 2nd monitor.
not a single moment of framerate slippage