Ok, an update.
First things first, my father is still with us, just about. He has a snapped hip, that is the upper thigh bone going into the socket has snapped. Because of his age and overall health condition they cannot operate so he is looking at selling up his house, selling off all his old workshop gear (thats going to be hard!) and getting a place we can adapt to allow him to have the best quality of life he can. He wont walk again under his own steam.
Secondly, this incident has made me rethink a few life choices. Like retirement for one. I hit 55 next year and have decided that I want to take partial retirement then and spend more time with the family, especially my father. I get a pretty hefty payout at 55 so i plan to ressurect my fun little 10 year plan then with a bigger budget than I currently have, im thinking i will allocate maybe around £2500 - £3000 to it and see if i can stretch the pc out to 10 years. My current pc is undergoing a few upgrades to hold me out till then. Recently aquired a very cheap A770 16gb (£170) and thats really improved the pcs capabilities overe the old GTX 970. There will be a few other upgrades no doubt.
Someone here mentioned that I should just get a ten year old pc and use that if i want to see an old pc try to keep up with modern games, i do actually have a pc here probably older than 10 years. Its a FX6300 with 8gb DDR3, R9 7970 3gb, Its one of the many pcs here. It can run world of tanks at medium settings and gets used now and then. its useable but i think it would self combust if I tried to play cyberpunk on it.
I still stand by the fact that a pc can be quite capable 10 years on, if you start out with a decent spec. And that was my biggest mistake, i didnt aim high enough at the outset. a top end pc from 2014 might have looked like this:
i7 5820K 6 core cpu
X99 motherboard
16gb DDR4
GTX 980 4gb
Now... such a pc would indeed be quite capable today and would most likley just about run AAA titles such as cyberpunk (no RT of course) at somewhat playable levels i believe. But the cpu i was intending to use being old 11th gen is setting the bar too low, as was the graphics card I originally suggested (7900 Rabbit) so my 2014 pc would have likley looked a bit more like this:
i7 3770K
1155 motherboard
16gb DDR3
R9 290 4gb
or something like that. Now, using something like that in 2024 to run something like cyberpunk for example would likely be... not the most enjoyable experience. Hence the rethink. So I will see you all back here for the revised 10 year plan in 2025