The noughties were a tumultuous time for PC hardware, despite planes not falling from the sky and entire IT infrastructures not collapsing after the Y2K bug. 3dfx and their famous Voodoo 3D graphics chipsets went the way of the dodo and ATI’s Radeon cards rose to greatness, whilst Pentiums and Athlons went toe-to-toe for CPU market share, and components in general continued their inexorable march towards being smaller, faster, cheaper and better, all in accordance with Moore’s Law.

So how far exactly have things come in the PC world over the last ten years? Just for giggles I had a hunt around some web archives looking for what kind of gaming system you could purchase for around $2,500 NZD at the turn of the millennium, and then compared it to what you could get today for the same amount of money. Here’s what I came up with: