Unfortunately I was low end until 3 years ago. I got my first PC at the age of 6, in 2000. It was a Pentium 133. In 2002 I got a Celeron 900 and some SIS integrated GPU. In 2004 I got a Celeron 2.4 and a FX5600XT which I upgraded 3 years later to a P4 2.8 and a 7600gs.
In 2008 I decided I knew enough about computers that I could build my own setup from the ground up and that's what I did. I got a Core2Duo at 2.33 GHz, 2GB RAM, a 7800GTX (lame choice unfortunately but at least I got it cheaply enough, 80Euro I think in late 2007) and a Gigabyte P35-DS3L or something.
The 7800GTX would overheat after a certain point and it restarted the whole system when trying to play games... I applied new thermal paste but I could never avoid the temperature hitting 100 C with the fan speed set at 100%! Turns out there must have been some lame bug on the fan controller program or maybe I hadn't created good flow of air inside the case, because the same card now gives me 60C at worst...
Funny story, a friend of mine was playing Unreal Tournament 3 while I was lying in bed when I heard a "beep". So I stand up and tell him "hey, someone's locked a missile on you" and he replied "no they haven't". And truth was, no message was displayed on the screen whenever the "beep" was heard. So I quickly checked the temps and that's when I saw 100 C!!! Hilarious! 😁
Performance wise, the 7800GTX was kind of a dog in 2008 so I used the temps (as well as my birthday which was close) as an excuse to get my dad to give me half the money I needed for the then brand new Radeon 4850. It had been only a week since it was released. I payed the rest of the money. Best 160 Euro I've ever given on PC hardware probably. This card was very powerful back then, I beat Crysis with it at High Detail and 1280x1024 and got a steady 30 fps most of the time. I also enjoyed the amazing graphics of Assassin's Creed, beautiful game although very repetitive. To this day, I can still play almost every game at 1600x900 and Medium to High details. Certainly the greatest graphics card I have ever owned.
The second huge problem I've encountered with this PC haunts me to this day and is probably the worst thing I have ever experienced with PCs. The hard drive would fail for no reason at all! I had a Seagate 7200.11 at first which was one of the error prone ones. I replaced it with a WD. I got a new motherboard (dirt cheap though, 30 Euro for an Asus P5K back in 2009), new PSU and it would still continue. I think with the 2nd replacement it was finally over, but there have been a couple of times where the system wouldn't recognize the drive at all. Occasionally the drive kinda lags during everyday use, once in 2 months or so, for like a second or two and I get this terrible feeling.
I truly wish this never happens again!!!