Cheapest System to play Arkham Asylum at 30 fps

amd.

That game uses the Unreal 3 based game engine so you wouldn't need to spend a whole lot.

Something along the lines of a AMD Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition and Radeon 4850 should work great for a 1680x1050 monitor. Something like this for under $600

Right now I have a somehwat old Dell computer with internal 256MB shared video graphics card, 2.something Core 2 Duo CPU, 1 Gig of RAM running on WinXP Pro. Surprisingly, I am still able to play FEAR 2 on it with about 30 framerates, it is not very comfortable but I am surprised my video card is actually able to handle the game.

Now the question you need to ask yourself is how much money you want to invest. You are looking at a minimum $600 which would get you a dual core CPU and 2 Gigs of RAM. Get Nvidia's generation 9 graphics card, like Geforce 9800GT.

Now, for about $750 you can possibly upgrade to a Quad CPU and 4 Gigs of RAM, with the same Geforce 9800GT. Also, AMD has a very nice new Phenom II X3, which is a triple core CPU with very nice performance. You are basically looking at a budget of $600-$800.