I mean, it was never free or cheap, per say, but I can remember dumpster diving for old Sun and NeXT Workstations when I was in college, and going to swap meets in the late 90's and buying everything I needed to build a budget gamer rig for cheap, and taking it home and building my own watercooling crap and not being afraid to reach for crazy overclocks, and if I toasted a $55 Duron or $75 budget motherboard, it wasn't an entire paycheck (or more) down the drain. MSRP wasn't a "thank god I found it" but a ceiling that almost no one ever paid. Building a gaming rig today almost requires a HELOC or signing your soul away to be a "influencer" -- and that's assuming you can still even get availability at ~any~ price. And it's not like the used hardware or dumpster diving is a viable avenue really either - everything is commodity laptops or AIOs or junk office dumb terminals.. or mobile phones. Not a lot of parts that can be stripped any longer.