I bought only 2 PC's in my lifetime. A Commodore PC Clone (8088), and later a 386SX from a local PC build shop.
I was at a Ham Radio flea market in the mid 80's when a buddy of mine that worked for IBM showed up with a few prototype 486-25 chips - and my building career began.
Since then I've done P1(x2), P3(x5) in 2000, P4(x4) in 2005, and the last round this past year was Socket 1150 ASUS boards(x 5). (Yes, I went
10 years on the P4 builds).
From the P3 forwards I've stuck to the same formula. Corsair Power Supply and Memory, ASUS mobo, Intel CPU, Nvidia graphics,WD hard drives, and Sony opticals.
On this latest build I got "$hit lucky" as my P4 builds were all ASUS "P4P800-E Deluxe" motherboards, that just happened to be used in medical imaging equipment back in the mid 2000's. (equipment way too expensive to just replace)
Now rare as hens teeth - they sell on Ebay for $200 as replacement parts. I could re-use PS, opticals, and HD's from the previous builds too, as they had been upgraded over the years.
So my new "fleet" of ASUS Maximus VII Hero setups came pretty cheap overall. (except for the 4790K CPUs in the 2 main PC's - I used Celerons in the "grunts")
I plan to get YEARS of service out of the new ones - eventually upgrading them to M1 SSD drives etc.
-W
PS:
https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards/MAXIMUS_VII_HERO/
Now "long in the tooth" - these still make for a super "budget build".
Socket 1150 CPU's range from about $35 to $335 new.
-W