I also recently upgraded the GPU in my ~4 year old PC, it cost me only the price of the new GPU and it&#x27;s one of the only upgrades I&#x27;ve needed to make in that time.<p>It sounds like you&#x27;re kind of an outlier in the build your own PC market -- it&#x27;s pretty impressive you managed to find a motherboard supporting only the old DDR2 ram and having to replace the CPU fan. You also seem to have had to replace the motherboard to support your (likely PCI-E) GPU. Even before I built my first computer PCI-E was long supported by even cheap pre-built PCs.<p>There&#x27;s a sweet spot around $600 for a PC, if you buy in this range you&#x27;ll save money because you won&#x27;t need to upgrade the majority of components in many years. I often recommend logicalincrements.com as it has PC prices per-component in tiers.<p>$150 is insanely cheap for a gaming PC and I don&#x27;t think $150 has ever been &quot;super expensive&quot; by PC standards.