Sup fellas
I got a $500 gift card from some work stuff, and spent a few days looking for crap to buy and couldn't come with anything that wasn't just spending to spend. My son is pretty into PC gaming and has a bunch of friends on discord that play together. Currently our setup is a rig that I built about 10 years ago - i7-2600k, GTX 480, 8gb, a few SSDs and SATA drives, Sabertooth p67 board, dual monitors. Not anything fancy in today's terms but it was a big chunk of money 10 years ago and thankfully it's still working really well. I had the store build it for me originally but I've taken it apart and cleaned it a couple of times so I'm not opposed to buying everything separate and building it with my son so he can learn.
Given all he knows is that 10 year old rig, I don't see any reason to go crazy on budget and buy top of the line stuff so I'm thinking a max budget of like $1k USD. I would think I could get at least the same specs as my current setup 10 years later for that budget amount. I think I spent around $2500 for the original setup and hopefully Moores law gets me better than that for this budget. I do want to future proof this a little bit but I don't know how much is too much in terms of device specs and I don't want to go overboard for no reason. He can use his own money later on to upgrade this as he wants.
I don't know anything about todays current standards for gaming requirements, so just looking for advice on what you would buy if I handed you $1k. Everything he plays now has zero issues on our current setup but thats mostly minecraft and he's getting into mods and fancy stuff. If the budget needs to go up that's fine, I just figured this was a good starting point and with the gift card it would only cost me $500. I'm not including monitors in this, I have a bunch of good ones collecting dust and we can make that birthday presents or he can buy them if he wants.
Appreciate any suggestions!