From 2020 I planned on building a new gaming PC. Bought an ITX case and followed hardware releases closely... And then got disillusioned with it all.

Picked up a Steam Deck in August of 2022 and couldn't be happier with it. The ITX case is collecting dust.

Yep. In fact I bought a second deck (OLED) instead of upgrading GPU’s. Prices are nuts, I’ll wait.

To be honest I stopped following PC hardware altogether because things were so stagnant

That's exactly what happened to me as well.

It's not exciting at all to pay attention to mediocre launches of expensive products. The GPU in my gaming PC is several generations old at this point but I don't really care. There are still plenty of good games that will run fine on it and I'm just going to hold tight. There are games that I still have yet to purchase that will run fine on my hardware. I'm not going to give my money to terribly optimized games or games that require high-end hardware.

The more expensive PC gaming becomes the more high-end hardware doesn't really matter. I think developers and publishers know that they need to target the average consumer because they need to sell volume on these games. If the average gamer is playing on older and/or lower end hardware then they need to service that market. There aren't enough 4090 buyers to sell the volume they need to make money. Hell, at these prices I'm not sure there are even enough 4070 or even 4060 level buyers to do that. Tons of people lost interest and aren't buying into this even if you still see posts online of people purchasing new GPUs.

I waited out the crypto market and I don't have problems waiting longer.

I'm surprised so many people are cross shopping tbh. I briefly considered steam deck, but specs are barely enough to play at 1080p so it's completely useless when docked and a purely portable device with a tiny screen and gamepad carries very little value to me personally.

I ended up getting eGPU enclosure for my laptop and grabbing a 1080ti from a friend that didn't need it anymore. I'm able to play D4 at 4k on medium settings.

Even if I had to buy a gpu like I was originally planning, ~$800 total to play in 4k on a 43" screen with a mouse and keyboard is a completely different experience from anything Xbox or steam deck offer.

How was that change? I’m thinking of doing the same, but it requires a power supply update too, so I’m on the fence.