An update: I went ahead and splurged on a $1200 build. I skipped the graphics card, for now, as I don’t do much gaming. The gaming I did do on my $300 build was just fine on the motherboard, so I have no worries about plugging in directly to the MB

My currently deceased computer is your old $300 build, with a few upgrades. As I am waiting for warranty parts to come in an attempt to revive it, my thoughts are with a new system. Most of my components can be used, like the liquid cooling, 2X8GB ram (which dropped half in price if I were to upgrade to 32), the hard…