Firing Squad Article - $500 Upgrade

So I’m sure some of you more experienced builders have seen this before, but for us noobs can you provide some clarity on this issue:

I recently read an article over at firing squad (http://www.firingsquad.com/hardwar [...] c_upgrade/) that basically argues that by concentrating on the right components (i.e. GPU) you can achieve FPS rates on par with upgrades costing twice as much. So with a $500 budget they design three budget upgrades (w/ stock clocks) that when pushed (e.g. COD 4 at 1920x1200x32, 4xAA, 16xAF) achieve great frames rates (~90%) compared to some more costly designs (http://www.firingsquad.com/hardwar [...] /page5.asp).

The conclusion after COD4, UT3, and Crysis is pretty similar (here’s the one from UT3):

“At low-res, the CPU plays a bigger role in performance and thus the Core 2 Extreme and Athlon 64 X2 6000+ systems hold a sizeable advantage over the budget rigs, but as the resolution increases this advantage slowly decreases. Ultimately by 1920x1200 the budget rigs trail the high-end GeForce 8800 GTX systems by roughly 12%, and if the high-end rigs are equally outfitted with GeForce 8800 GT cards performance is essentially the same, as you’re GPU-bound at that resolution and the CPU has no impact on performance.”

This seems too good to be true. I’d like to try this, but before I sink $500 on this “experiment” can someone tell me if I’m missing the fine print? It sounds too good to be true – as long as you’re willing to accept a 10-15% drop in FPS.

The article closes by saying:

“If you are starting completely from scratch, and have to build a system from the ground up, you’d probably need to spend another $200-$300 for the OS, hard drive, case, power supply, and optical drive. While $800 is a lot of money, it’s still far from the $1,500-$2,000+ a lot of PC gaming naysayers would have you believe.”

Thanks for your help.