I was wondering when people consider themselves to have a new PC. Technically I’ve had the same PC for close to 20 years now, but every part’s been upgraded several times over.
I figure everyone’s got a different mind about it. For me, I’d have to say when all of the big three—CPU, GPU, mobo—have completed a phase, my brain thinks of the previous setup as “the old PC”.
In my head, for basically no reason, the motherboard is “the” PC. It’s the one large part that really sets the overall generation. I could swap my previous PC’s motherboard into my new case, the thing is DDR4 RAM and an AM4 CPU would have to come with it.
Because I do shit like build a SFF PC with an ITX board in a small case, and then turn around and build a fairly standard mATX board in a mini-tower, a lot of the case, case accessories, and GPU are fitted to the system. It would actually be pretty stupid to put the parts of my last PC in my current case because they’d swim.