When can I buy an affordable, complete RISC-V computer? I've been long planning to cook my own with FPGA but it seems like soon we'll start getting affordable RISC-V CPUs with other utility support?
Affordable RISC-V systems will only happen if they reach a comparable level of mass production as proprietary systems. What you will more likely see for now is a gradual increase in the number of components on GPUs, HDDs etc which use RISC-V instead of ARM or something else. The ISA is only a part of the cost equation.
The LowRisc project seems to have the mission you're looking for:
"What are the goals of the project?
To create a fully open SoC and low-cost development board and to support the open-source hardware community. This will involve volume silicon manufacture..."
They have 2 folks with prior experience on the Rpi team. But, it's hard to tell when they might have something ready. http://lowrisc.org
The upshot of this is you can run lowRISC 0.6 on something like the Nexys 4 DDR (other FPGAs are available) and have a real Linux distro running on an FPGA, rather slowly and with limited RAM. They even managed to make the ethernet port work using an entirely free stack (though you still unfortunately need Vivado for a while to compile it) and it's a step towards having an ASIC that is completely freely licensed. So it's still baby-steps but I'm glad the lowRISC project came back to life.
They sell an Arduino-class device (technically a computer) called the HiFive1 for $59, and there was a crowdfunded SBC called the HiFive Unleashed that was a limited run for $999. Both are about 5-10x too expensive for poor me, but I'm keeping my hopes up for a commodity-priced SBC to replace my laptop when it finally kicks the bucket.
With QEMU you can already do amazing things. Every component required by Linux From Scratch has been stable, and you can get a Fedora/Debian image for that as well.
They started planning before it was clear that RV64GC would be the standard profile. I think its highly likely that they will go in that direction as well.
It's most likely going to be like with ARM and be embedded only, sadly. There's a large number of us, not large enough though, that want a standard ATX motherboard, with PCI-Express and an ARM, RISC-V or PowerPC processor (well an affordable PowerPC).
!! The Raptor workstation was just barely outside my budget; if I hadn't just upgraded my actual workstation I probably could have talked myself into it.
Assuming it's priced comparably cheaper to the raptor, I am buying a blackbird as soon as it comes out.
MACCHIATObin is a mini-ITX ARMv8 board with PCIe and great firmware (comes with U-Boot but you can flash (or chainload from u-boot) EDK2/TianoCore with ACPI support (!) and even QEMU for the "GPU BIOS" thingy that lets you get video out as EFI framebuffer)
Also there's the SoftIron Overdrive 1000 (sold only as full system, not bare board)
I'm not sure how useful one of those would really be, to be honest. There's not really much benefit in terms of openness - even though the architecture is open, these actual implementations are entirely proprietary with license agreements that forbid reverse-engineering. Plus it's just not as widely supported as ARM on the software side right now.