PC hardare getting cheaper

Is it me or has gaming on the PC got cheaper. My first proper PC for gaming was bought in 1999-1999 itcost me £1000 didn't have a graphics card and was a pentium 350mhz. Ended up buying a vodoo3 for it.Played the game alright, but started to struggle later on.

Then in late 2000, i spent £2000 on a PC, 1ghz pentium, 128mb ram, geforce 2 gts card, later upgraded to a geforce 3 card and by god it played games again alright but after a year or so it started to struggle with the games. Planetside was really really bad.

So for a long time afterwards i dealt with low settings, and poor fps, and got myself a ps2.

skip to 2005 and i got me a PC for £600, AMD 64 3000, 1gb ram and a 6600gt, that PC is still going and is my media pc, where i play a few games like FEAR, Beyond good and evil, trackmania, etc from my sofa and little hdtv.

My next PC was in early 2006, again cost me around $600, amd 64 3000, 2 gb ram , 7600gt, this is my main gaming PC, upgraded the CPU to a X2 4400, and a 8800gts 640MB card, and i play all the new games on high. Crysis on High and post pros. on medium. Have switch shadows and shaders on medium to give me a boost in multiplayer games.

So what my point, as far as i can tell PC gaming is a lot chaper than it used to be. My next PC which will be purchased next year should cost me around £700, going to get a quad core (intel or amd), 9 series card and 4gb of ram.

I could stick with my present gaming PC for another year, but i want my hands on a quad so hence buying a new one.

I don't think PC hardware is getting particularly cheaper, but you are definitely buying smarter. If you spent a thousand pounds on your original PC in '99, you got totally ripped off. I bought my first PC in 2000 - it was a 666mhz P3 with 256mb ram and a GeForce 1. It was less than £1,000. The PC you got in late 2000 is only slightly better than the PC I bought, and it cost twice as much. You could have easily got that same PC for under a grand, and even cheaper if you'd built rather than bought.You made two profoundly poor purchases there.

You made a smarter purchase in 2005, but it was also a mid range PC so the price is hardly surprising - 6 series cards were at least a year old by then, I think, and the 6600gt is a low end model. The price seems about standard to me.

But the PC you're aiming for for next year, I don't know. If you build rather than buy, and you get a low end card, you can probably swing that for £700, especially if you can harvest some RAM from your current PC. But if you're going for anything higher than the budget card on a9 series, you just won't be able to do it until 2010, I'd say.