Pop Culture

(My estimate number for "a gaming PC so expensive you would have no reason to ever build it" is $5k btw)

I looked at builds for NVidia's current "design your dream build with a budget of $5k" contest, and it doesn't go nearly as far as you'd think now. RAM prices are absurd beyond measure now, to say nothing of how GPUs have gone. Like it breaks down to $2.5k for a 5090 and around $1k for 128GB of RAM. If you just slapped down the best consumer CPU (~$600-700) and GPU (~$2500-3000), maxed out the RAM ($1,500-2000), included a nice monitor ($500-1000), and didn't bother cutting corners on the rest (which broadly end up in the range of $100-200 each, plus or minus some) you'd probably hit $7k with how fucked PC parts are right now.

So pretty close to your guess, since the big fluctuation is fairly recent.