3. How well will it run games such as Half-Life 2 or TF2?
Super max
Processor - http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=10011808&prodlist=celebros
Valve games are piss easy to run. Really, Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress 2 are not high end taxing games.
Get quad core.
Here's a good way to know. If you can play 90% of games listed here (including Crysis) then, yeah, you got a good PC...http://cyri.systemrequirementslab.com/CYRI/intro.aspx
That site is hardly accurate.
That is a quad core.
No its not. http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=43546
Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology (dual-core with 4 threads)