What Makes A Gaming Computer?

So much babble on this subject, not much useful to me.  So, like what subsystems matter, and in what order?  Video first.
V-chip or VRAM?
Processor?
Bus speed?
Drive speed?

the software subsystem ("the games") of course, the hardware is secondary. :O.

i would say video card and processor mainly

>>3
I'm still struggling to discern the relative value of the main CPU(s) processor(s) vs the Vcard processor.

I also see that top-end machines oftimes use a stripped array for storage so I/O matters therefore bus speed matters.

I'm trying to define the relationships/ratios.

#1 Card
#2 Bus
#3 CPU
#4 Drive

Mind you, it's a bit more complicated than that. If you don't have enough RAM, or the game accesses the drive a lot, the drive may be more important than the CPU even. Or if a game is properly optimized, the effects of bus will be reduced. Yadda, yadda.

>>4
That depends to a large extent on what kind of games you want to play.

First-person shooters are extremely GPU-intensive.  They have to draw and texture huge numbers of polygons.  They aren't so CPU-intensive, as there isn't a whole lot of other stuff going on; in a very real sense, Doom 3 is DOOM with a 3D engine and extremely complex 3D monsters stumbling around more or less randomly in the dark.

Flight sims and racing games are extremely CPU-intensive, running dozens of complex physics models in real time, and possibly dozens of complex AI routines simultaneously as well.  They tend to be not nearly as GPU-intensive, though if you run at very high resolutions with anti-aliasing you'll put a strain on even the most expensive video card.

Does that make sense?

Plenty of FPSes are pretty CPU-heavy too, though (or certainly they're going that way) - they also have AI routines for enemies. And what of the physics routines in the Source engine, for example? You won't get HL2 running nicely on 1.5GHz machine, fast GPU or not, as your graphics card won't do the calculations for AI or physics.