Space is a big factor when you get involved with game modding or graphics in any form.
And technically, anything "new" on the market is already actually 18 months out of date. For example, 4-core CPUs or already last year's high end. AMD released 6, 8, and 12-core CPUs to the industrial workstation market. And the stuff they are soon to be shipping makes those look slow. The "PC" market is always from 6 months upto 2 years behind the industrial markets. Also the Laptop Market is about 2 years behind the Desktop PC market. Right now, a high end "workstation" has 16GB of RAM, up-to 16 TB HDD space, and 12-core CPUs with each core clocking 2.2 gHz per core (simply means that it can process over 24 billion instructions per second) with GPUs (which are upto 10 core GPUs) running about 75% of the same processing capabilities as the 12-core CPUs (the only bottleneck is the FSB which is slowed down to around 800mhz, but multi-treading enables that to around 3.2ghz... And that don't even touch what the corperate Servers can do, nor any military servers... but let's say I know currently is well over 50 times more that the "workstations" I just mentioned are able to do. Now as for a 10 year preview, in the year 2000, the top end Workstations averaged 1.2ghz single core CPUs, 512MB RAM, 20-40GB HD space, 1 single core 450mHz GPU all running on a system with a 133mHz FSB bottleneck... Simply, we have systems about 25-36 times better than 10 years ago. If this holds true for the next 10 years, then we will be running on systems with Multi-core CPUs (which may or maynot be vector type CPUs) chewing up between 10 and 200 Trillion instructions per second, averaging 256GB-4TB RAM, GPUs that actually match the CPUs and HDD space in the range of 1-10 PetaBytes (or more). Tha only slowdowm will be the FSB and internet speed, which internet will be required, not optional. We will be lucky to see the 1-GBit bandwidth which current NICs are already capable of (Currently, we are using less than half the Bandwidth a 100MBit NICs can handle, which have been around for 15 or so years). But I can speculate we will have Broadband Bandwidth in the range of 30-100 MBit for Downstream, and upwards of 10-50MBit upstream.
I bet you can't hardly wait for you new system in 10 years Maj.