[orbifold]

The installation is by now very straightforward, if you have for example Gigabyte board and standard components. In 2012 I bought a i7-3770, 8gb ram, nvidia gtx 680, gigabyte-z77-d3h and 256 SSD. On such hardware all it takes is readjusting some BIOS settings (turn on AHCI, disable Intel Vd) and maybe install a ethernet driver and sound driver. I'm pretty sure an equivalent iMac would have been significantly more expensive, than what I paid then.

[lokeshk]

I agree - the front cost is not as high as it used to be. Although, the maintenance cost is probably high which is what I was hinting to in my comment. How has your experience been around upgrades in the last two years? The apps like iMessage check BIOS to ensure that it's apple hardware that they are running on. And between upgrades, those things can potentially change. How many adjustments have you had to make along the way?