With rapidly falling prices on CPUs and GPUs, there's really no excuse why you can't build a good gaming rig for Battlefield 2142 at any budget. As we've shown you in our CPU performance article, you don't need a $999 Core 2 Extreme to extract the most out of the game (unless you plan on playing at 800x600 without AA/AF), one of the lower-end Core 2 CPUs or Athlon 64 X2s should more than suffice. In fact since the game doesn't take advantage of dual-core CPUs anyway you could honestly get by with a sub-$100 CPU like the Athlon 64 3500+ and still come away with a good system for gaming in Battlefield 2142.

And as we just showed you in today's article, as long as you keep the image quality settings in check, you can get pretty good performance out of BF2142 with the latest mainstream graphics cards from NVIDIA, including the GeForce 6600 GT and 7600 GS, although if you can afford to splurge, it really wouldn't hurt to get a 7600 GT or 7900 GS.

For example, going from the GeForce 6600 GT to the 7600 GT we saw a 2X increase in performance, going from 29.1 fps to 51.6 fps at 1600x1200. That's a pretty remarkable performance improvement. The GeForce 7900 GS was even faster still, offering nearly 30% more performance over the 7600 GT at the same resolution. Never before has $200 bought so much performance.