First PC, Paid $1200 for a 486DX 33mhz rig with a 3 1/2 AND 5 1/4 floppy drive. I think it had a 240 meg hard drive, 8 meg of memory, no sound card, no modem, and a Trident VGA VESA compliant video card with 512K of memory, 14" crt. They had a deal where I worked you could buy through them, and they would hold payments out of your check for a year. The PC was a brand called "Royal", which at the time owned by our parent Company, Olivetti USA. It was a decent PC at the time, with a really nice, solid and heavy mid tower case I used for years and several upgrades.
Since then it has been all upgrades. My limit is $500 for each upgrade.
Last upgrade was a Phenom II 920, Gigabyte board, and 4 gig of DDR2 1066 that cost me $305.