A GTX 1080 Ti today costs the same as an entire PC build in 2017 – and one containing said 1080 Ti, at that. RAM today costs 2-4x its price in 2016 and 2017. SSDs, at best, have stagnated; at worst, some have increased in price marginally. Today, we’re benchmarking a 2017 “MSRP” PC build versus a 2018 current-price PC build, using a $1500 budget. Our objective was to see how far we could push performance at around $1500, using only new components, when comparing the best prices of yesteryear versus the prices of today. If there must be a point to this content, the primary takeaway is to avoid purchasing new GPUs at prices so far beyond MSRP that they enter old flagship categories. As for components, we’re using Intel as a baseline, as platform scalability makes more sense when tested between the same architectures (going to Ryzen, for instance, would make for better performance in Blender, but worse performance in games, thus killing the point of a like-for-like dollar-stretching benchmark). Intel has also had the most severe price swings in the past year, whereas AMD has remained largely steady at launch Ryzen prices, and has often dipped well under them. Intel has remained north of MSRP or at MSRP. Our builds are as follows: