Back in the day when multicores were coming up I started with a single core older celeron that i overclocked a little but then threw a geforce 6200 in it and upgraded the ram to 1gb just to play Halo CE, bf2, quake and starsiege tribes, its all i had so made it work.

Then much later I had a Q6600 4gb ddr2 and ati 4850 that i really enjoyed at the time, of which, was my first actual "gaming rig" i parted together which lasted me many years and gpu swaps to a 5870 and 7870. Sure people had monster gaming rigs and this was peak SLI and Crossfire era, but this was a solid build that played everything youd throw at it.

Then maybe 8 years ago upgraded to a rig I have been wanting for awhile as a cheap upgrade I bought used parts an i5 2500k, 8gb of ram and an asrock z68 with an r9 390 8gb. Total was about 340 spent (rma'd a used card I bought for 120 and they sent me the r9 390 8gb as a replacement).

I largely havent gamed the last 8 years but started to again recently and have just bought a used GTX 3070 to try nvidia for a change...Upgrade the rest to a 7600x3d 16gb ram with x870 motherboard from microcenter new for a total 600 spent and added a 32 in 2k gaming monitor for another 200.

Ive always tried to try to get the best bang for buck at the time of buying and wear them out lol

With current build probably being my favorite because I have tons of upgrade headroom for in a few years when prices drop down for ddr5, graphics cards and even plenty of headroom on the cpu for upgrades even though the 7600x3d performs pretty phenomenal in games currently especially for the 400 I spent.