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

I buy old electronics for 1/10 of what new stuff costs, install Linux or Foss os, keep it for years without problems until hard drive goes

I don't game on PC but neither do a lot of people who pay $2500 for a laptop, people who inevitably call me for tech help for basic shit.

What's the point? I'd rather have the commons than like a mountain of consumer goods that all suck and are getting worse.

Still on a 1060 here. Sure, it's too slow for anything from the PS5 era, but that's what my PS5 is for.

It does have a 1 in 4 chance of bluescreening when I quit FFXIV, but I don't know what's causing that. Running it at 100% doesn't seem to crash it, possibly something about the drivers not freeing shit properly, I dunno.

If not playing competitive, there's very little reason to go latest and greatest. Just buy something with software support, or use Linux where support is practically guaranteed for at least a decade

My $90US AWOW mini with Celeron J4125, 8 gigs of shared memory, 128gig SSD seems to run FreeDoom as good as any of the other potatos them GamerBoi fancy water cooled custom boxes have.........

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.

My 1080Ti finally died this year (started overheating). I've kept it though, in the hope I can fix it one day...

Every other part is just cobbled together from older rigs or sporadic upgrade pushes when a sale looks good.

Still have a PC after 12 years that my brother is using

Used to get this with Linux gaming and proton too. Love getting told something I see with my own eyes isn't true.

I've upgraded pretty much everything in my 2009 PC and only just finally bought a new CPU. I just need a new case.for everything. The last straws were Elden Ring being CPU bottle necked at 20 FPS and Helldivers 2 requiring some instruction that wasn't on my CPU.

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.

Yeah I'm daily-ing a laptop from 2019 with an i7-9750, a GTX1650, and 16 gb of RAM. No upgrades except storage. The GPU is the only thing that sometimes makes me go "hm."

If people are pushing you to buy stuff, they are not friends. Do not listen to them.

My i5 3450 is really showing its limits, but I'm broke as fuck 🤷

I also have a 2014-ish desktop. Over the years added an SSD and replaced the graphics card around 5 years ago.

I can still run most games on medium settings, even some new ones if they are properly optimized, but nothing crazy, 1080p.

I just started to feel that my rig is getting slower and even AA games become more demanding.

I fully support using hardware as long as possible to minimise e-waste and see no reason to upgrade a PC every 2-3 years.

Edit: typo

Only stopped using my Bulldozer-era box because it started crashing and freezing. And a BIOS fix Asus support suggested nuked my board. I had the thing maxed out... 12 SSDs in soft RAID, GTX570s in SLI. It was a monster. I still have most of the parts and I'm sure it would run a lot of stuff just fine at the cost of heat and noise :]

I had to replace my computer because it died.