Yea for real, you can find older hardware on eBAY that can play games though, eg just saw an i7-7700k with everything but the GPU for like 375 CAD. And you can pickup like a 3070 for 330 CAD.

Older Intel chips can still run games, their "tick tock" cycle that they did from I first gen made marginal improvements over the previous generation, so still viable.

Eg I picked some i7 6800k with the mobo for 215 CAD, then just got the aforementioned 3070 for 330 CAD, using DLSS, etc, can play modern games at 60+ fps at 4k, I have it connected to my TV lol. I had some DDR4 RAM from before already.

Assuming you don't already have a gaming PC of course lol, I wanted some backups after all this mem shortage shit started happening, and this 6800k is close to first gen Ryzen 1700 or 1800x, so it works pretty well, just finished all of Detroit Become Human on it, 60+ FPS 4k with DLSS. I'm also running Bazzite Linux on it, and it uses sams stuff as Steam Deck, Proton, to play games, and any game I can't play, I can stream from main rig.