If you are going to compare what you can purchase today vs then, you should be comparing what you got for $600 vs what you can get for about $1000 today.
In the around 1000 dollar point today, if you set the design constraint to 1080p gaming, you can do quite a lot with a $175 CPU in a $145 motherboard, add maybe another $150 of RAM, and a $100 NVME SSD. The problem is the video card availability and marketing pricing.
Fair enough, I suppose, but seeing as it's over 20 years ago, I'm having a hard time deciding where those parts would fit. I figured those were all mid-grade parts, and today, a mid-grade GPU would be an RTX 3070 which has an MSRP of $500-600 depending on the brand, and a midgrade CPU (like a current gen Ryzen 5) will be nearly $300, that doesn't give you much left for the motherboard, RAM, storage, etc...