Shlouski
VIP Member
Bingo. People are terrible at "future proofing" in most instances. Basically just don't work yourself into a dead or dying platform and you're set. CPU's age much more gracefully than GPU's and you can run a single platform with a GPU upgrade once or twice for easily 5+ years. You and me both are good examples of that. My total money spent on my machine is actually pretty small considering I've had nearly 5 years of use on it. My peripherals are probably almost as valuable as the actual machine.
Future proofing is a myth in the most part, by the time you want to upgrade you have very limited options due to things like lack of support and socket changes, also upgrading to old out tech usually is not worth the money over buy something new which is significantly more powerful, don't end up wasting money for small improvements. Buy what performs best for your needs in your price range, making sure its capable of doing what you need to do and then replace it when required, other than GPU, RAM and expansion slots depending what the computer will be used for, forget trying to future proof.