That's awesome. I build my own desktop for $1700 in parts in 2012. Not unsubstantial, but definitely not breaking the bank either. I had really come to take it for granted over the course of the last few years, as it's just one of multiple boxes I work on these days.
I started working on it pretty intensively again in the past few months and... man, for being 11+ years old it keeps up. Turns out I got lucky with the longevity of the i7-3820, GTX 770, and (what at the time was a ridiculous for a home machine) 32gb of ram in it.
Benchmarked (anecdotally) against a more modern (2021 build, 3x the cost) desktop, raytraced renderings still take 8x as long. But if I'm designing / modeling in 3d or BIM there is LITERALLY no dropoff.
I'm still going to make a new build soon because I'm getting back into not having time for that 8x hit on renderings. But I had no idea when I put this thing together 11 years ago that it would serve me so well for so long.
I also have a 7 year old laptop I bought for $140 new that I've put #!++ on and which keeps up just fine for most things the average punter would need in a machine.
I started working on it pretty intensively again in the past few months and... man, for being 11+ years old it keeps up. Turns out I got lucky with the longevity of the i7-3820, GTX 770, and (what at the time was a ridiculous for a home machine) 32gb of ram in it.
Benchmarked (anecdotally) against a more modern (2021 build, 3x the cost) desktop, raytraced renderings still take 8x as long. But if I'm designing / modeling in 3d or BIM there is LITERALLY no dropoff.
I'm still going to make a new build soon because I'm getting back into not having time for that 8x hit on renderings. But I had no idea when I put this thing together 11 years ago that it would serve me so well for so long.