Your experience is pretty similar to mine! I went with two 7900GT in SLI for my first machine tho—an 8800GTS would have been a better pick. That mobo cost me around 240 and it was fairly high end.
High end nowadays consists of a lot more stuff, though, and prices have not largely increased. Consider the difference between the 8800 series when it came out to the cost of a 3090/4090/5090! When my store got the 8800 series in we all laughed, that was way too much for a video card, nobody’s gonna spend over 600 dollars on a single video card! … D:
For motherboards though, I’d say 180-300 today covers pretty much all mid/high end boards, save for a few outliers. I’d be curious to know what an average user would get out of a board that costs more than 350.
Your experience is pretty similar to mine! I went with two 7900GT in SLI for my first machine tho—an 8800GTS would have been a better pick. That mobo cost me around 240 and it was fairly high end.
High end nowadays consists of a lot more stuff, though, and prices have not largely increased. Consider the difference between the 8800 series when it came out to the cost of a 3090/4090/5090! When my store got the 8800 series in we all laughed, that was way too much for a video card, nobody’s gonna spend over 600 dollars on a single video card! … D:
For motherboards though, I’d say 180-300 today covers pretty much all mid/high end boards, save for a few outliers. I’d be curious to know what an average user would get out of a board that costs more than 350.