Not the parent poster, but I also bought a computer in 2010 for about $1000 and am very happy with it today. I still play games at max or near max settings with no problem. This does not include a monitor though; also I only bought a 1650x1050 monitor, so I save a bit on graphics power by not having the full HD pixel count (or more).

EDIT: don't know my full specs offhand; i5, gtx 460, either 4 or 8 gigs RAM (4 I think), a 120gb SSD and 2G HD

My i7-875K (overclocked, but not exhaustively; my Gigabyte motherboard has an auto-overclock function that raised the multiplier without killing stability) with 16GB of RAM, entirely too many SSDs for any one person, and a Radeon HD6870 is capable of playing every new game I've bought this year (Dishonored, Saints Row IV--I don't buy games from EA so the new title list is pretty short right now) at max settings at no worse than 35FPS--I personally can't detect a difference between 30FPS and 60FPS, so I don't care.

Neither Dishonered or Saints Row IV are particularly intensive games. I get in excess of 100FPS in both and my cards (GTX 670s SLI) barely hut 30-35% usage…

I don't doubt the OPs rig is powerful enough to play modern games, but I seriously question the "any modern game at highest settings" statement.

FWIW, I built a rig a great rig in 2010 which I still use from time to time. i7 920, 12GB DDR3, SSD, SLI GTX 460 2GB.

More like impossible. The Internet has many PC building communities and none of them could do it. Hell an i7 and good GPU at the time easily brought you over 600$, which means very little money for a motherboard than can keep up.