heh. Tuffgong hit teh nail on teh head. Most "hardcore gamers" don't just love to play the game at the best possible FPS they can, but they also USUALLY love to be the one that built the computer that they are doing so on. granted, Alienware is a good PC (though you mostly pay for the Alienware name and the not-yet-on-sale case), you can build your own perfectly good system and spend WELL under half the price of an Alienware. He almost seems more along the lines of the n00bish hardcore gamer. u know, the one's that always talk s*it to you cause they killed you dozens of times over, but they wind up staying within eyesight of an Health + Shield regenerator (used that example cause that's what happened to me recently in dm_Lockdown in HL2DM). They always think they're so "l33t" or whatever, but they're really just little cowards with no skill that have to rely on the most ridiculous excuse of a tactic. For all i know he's the one i was playin against.
On top of that, he says it's not a matter of what's needed, but a matter of having the highest performance.... most gamers know that a game can only look so good before you're just spending money on stuff that's not even getting entirely used. he coulda bought a P4 2.4, OC'ed it to like 3.0, bought a GeForce 6800, and been pretty damn good to go with a nice framerate and good quality. Getting a P4EE 3.4 and 4GB of ram and all that other crap was a large amount of money wasted, as well as a bunch of stupidity that he could have wasted on something else.