Greentext

Yeah, I'm with you anon. Here's my rough upgrade path (dates are approximate):

• 2009 - built PC w/o GPU for $500, only onboard graphics; worked fine for Minecraft and Factorio
• 2014 - added GPU to play newer games (~$250)
• 2017 - build new PC (~$800; kept old GPU) because I need to compile stuff (WFH gig); old PC becomes NAS
• 2023 - new CPU, mobo, and GPU (~$600) because NAS uses way too much power since I'm now running it 24/7, and it's just as expensive to upgrade the NAS as to upgrade the PC and downcycle

So for ~$2200, I got a PC for ~15 years and a NAS (drive costs excluded) for ~7 years. That's less than most prebuilts, and similar to buying a console each gen. If I didn't have a NAS, the 2023 upgrade wouldn't have had a mobo, so it would've been $400 (just CPU and GPU), and the CPU would've been an extreme luxury (1700 -> 5600 is nice for sim games, but hardly necessary). I'm not planning any upgrades for a few years.

Yeah it's not top of the line, but I can play every game I want to on medium or high. Current specs: Ryzen 5600, RX 6650 XT, 16GB RAM.

People say PC gaming is expensive. I say hobbies are expensive, PC gaming can be inexpensive. This is ~$150/year, that's pretty affordable... And honestly, I could be running that OG PC from 2009 with just a second GPU upgrade for grand total of $800 over 15 years if all I wanted was to play games.

I could say I still run my 2014 (or 15, I don't remember) PC, but it's Ship of Theseus'd at this point, the only OG parts left are the CPU, PSU, case, and mobo.

I upgraded last year from i7-4700k to i7-12700k and from GTX 750Ti to RTX 3060Ti, because 8 threads and 2GB of vram was finally not enough for modern games. And my old machine still runs as a home server.

The jump was huge and I hope I'll have money to upgrade sooner this time, but if needed I can totally see that my current machine will work just fine in 6-8 years.

5 years here, a lower-end purchase to begin with. Still works fine. Only a few games I need to lower to True Potato settings to run.

My current PC is an asus rog with a gtx 1070 (and a piece of shit screen that gets all fucky if it heats) that I bought used, back in late 2019. The old hard drive failed some time ago and I had to change it, sometimes the main SSD seems to get strangely fucky (BSODs followed by disk scans), too, as does the memory (BSODs about "corrupted_page_memory", also complete freezes under Linux Mint, not even ctrl alt F1 worked), which makes me think the components aren't exactly high quality (considering how shitty the screen is and asus in general in the past years, that's no surprise)

Still, I fully intend to keep this bad boy as my main workhorse for at least another 2 years, possibly longer. After that, I'll probably relegate it to being the party game machine.

I always keep my PCs for about 8 years. Usually it is necessary to update the HDD/SSD and the GPU during that time, that is all. Mine will be 4 years old by the end of this year. I am now actively checking out 4TB SSDs in order to replace my current 1TB SSD.

This strategy may stop to work unfortunately. With the advent of ARM in desktop PCs, the PCs seem to become more monolithic. RAM and GPU not swappable, I think MACs don't even allow you to plop in more RAM. I don't like this development.

I'm still pushing a ten year old PC with an FX-8350 and a 1060. Works fine.

For me the most important reason to upgrade things is security updates. E.g. if you have an old smartphone it might not get security updates anymore.

Some people don't seem to care, but I get paranoid about hackers breaking into my phone in some way.

I upgraded and the new graphics card makes a buzzing sound. It seems low quality despite the high price.

I’m running a 2015 MacBook Pro still. I’m not spending $2k+ on a computer again anytime soon.

My wife is on a 1070 and I am on a 2070 both on 1440p her fave game is 7d2d runs perfect.