My PC Parts Addiction
Like any addiction, the dreadful compulsion to constantly upgrade PC components can be deemed a problem when it starts cutting into your budget, social life, relationships, etc. So for those in denial, it started shortly after you realized that you could improve performance by one simple little upgrade, and it took off from there.
For me, it's now at the point where I haven't even finished tweaking the current upgrade before I'm researching the next one. Hard to define exactly when my system became "high end", maybe the day I installed the H100 and overclocked it to 4.5 GHz.
Some would say my system still isn't high end, since I only have an i5-3570k and 8 GB of 2400 MHz RAM, but it does what I need it to do in a timely fashion, especially when compared to my old system.
I did manage to build this system on a very tight budget, starting from a Pentium 4 3.2GHz, socket 775 board, and DDR3 1333MHz, and upgrading 1 or 2 parts at a time until ended up with my current system.