Well, the SSDs are pretty expensive. I plan to tack on at least a small SSD drive later on to my custom machine. I think I went a little light in power with mine. I bought an ASRock motherboard, A3+ socket, AMD Athelon X2 processor, 3.2gHz (?), with 8GB Ram, Radeon HD 6570, and a fullsized tower, with temperature reader and fan control, with the possibility of 4 fans. With the 1TB SATA drive, I think I spent little over $400 on it. I had to put all that on credit, but it was worth the time/money. So if you want to build your own desktop, if you play your cards right and you know where you can Now, as far as games are concerned, it can handle a lot of stuff fine. I think I was able to run Dead Space 3 with little trouble. For some reason, Planetside 2 is sucking on it, but I dunno if that's the WiFi adaptor I have, or if it really is performance issues. To your question of if the G6 can handle gaming, from what I see, it can handle some of it fine, but keep in mind, that processor is middle of the road speed. There are processors that are much better than that, and I can't speak for the graphics card, but I think there are newer models than that. But, it looks like if Dark Souls and TF2 is what you're going to be playing, then yeah it should handle it.