I think these days the PC value argument is a lot more about longevity and versatility than price.
Like in my case, I want to have an old fashioned LAN gaming setup in my house. I’ve already managed to find four PCs stored away, and they are all going to work great. Three are already set up and have linux installed and everything. So they cost a decent amount in their day, but now they’re kind of just free extras.
I’ve been with my wife for around 10 years now. When we started dating she had a PC that wasn’t exactly top of the line, and it was already a couple years old, but was still pretty beefy for its time. She did a couple upgrades over the years, more RAM, SSD, etc. but most of the components were the same ones she originally bought probably around 2013-ish
About a year ago she decided it was time for a major upgrade and built a whole new computer.
I took all of her old components and stuck them in a new case. I of course had to buy a hard drive, power supply, some fans, etc. and it wasn’t maxing out the graphics on the latest AAA games like her new rig can, but it still managed to run pretty much everything I threw at it.
After a couple months I did scrounge up a newer graphics card from a friend doing some upgrades of his own, which was a nice upgrade, but not totally necessary.
I am now running into an issue with some newer games not liking the old processor even though it technically has the required specs (and it’s not windows 11 compatible) so I’m likely going to be doing some major overhauls of my own soon, and I think I’ll probably recycle these components into a home server or something, so I wouldn’t really be surprised if this PC of theseus remains in service in some capacity for a full 20+ years.
I think these days the PC value argument is a lot more about longevity and versatility than price.
Like in my case, I want to have an old fashioned LAN gaming setup in my house. I’ve already managed to find four PCs stored away, and they are all going to work great. Three are already set up and have linux installed and everything. So they cost a decent amount in their day, but now they’re kind of just free extras.
I’ve been with my wife for around 10 years now. When we started dating she had a PC that wasn’t exactly top of the line, and it was already a couple years old, but was still pretty beefy for its time. She did a couple upgrades over the years, more RAM, SSD, etc. but most of the components were the same ones she originally bought probably around 2013-ish
About a year ago she decided it was time for a major upgrade and built a whole new computer.
I took all of her old components and stuck them in a new case. I of course had to buy a hard drive, power supply, some fans, etc. and it wasn’t maxing out the graphics on the latest AAA games like her new rig can, but it still managed to run pretty much everything I threw at it.
After a couple months I did scrounge up a newer graphics card from a friend doing some upgrades of his own, which was a nice upgrade, but not totally necessary.
I am now running into an issue with some newer games not liking the old processor even though it technically has the required specs (and it’s not windows 11 compatible) so I’m likely going to be doing some major overhauls of my own soon, and I think I’ll probably recycle these components into a home server or something, so I wouldn’t really be surprised if this PC of theseus remains in service in some capacity for a full 20+ years.
You can scratch out PC and replace it with (console of choice) and still have paid less even back then.