Was my first ever build started in 2011 as a i7-2600K and GTX 580 based build. Small OCZ SSD back when SSDs were a pretty new thing and cost an arm and a leg. Case was originally an Antec Lanboy Air but it sucked and quickly became a Nanoxia Deep Silence 2 (hipster R4).
In 2014 I got factory refurb 780 Ti Superclockeds for $350/ea. Great price at the time.
When it comes to cases, I've always a Silverstone FT02, but I could never stomach the $250 price tag. In 2017, I was browsing r/hardwareswap and a guy was selling his FT02 + accessories for less than $100, DM'd him and found out he lives literally a few blocks away. Got my dream case that day. Even though the FT02 is definitely an old design by now, I love it. The build quality is second to none and the 90 degree rotated motherboard is super neat. If you're into air cooling, this is still an excellent case.
By September 2017, I was definitely bottlenecked at 1440p by the 780 Ti's, 3GB of VRAM, and was generally getting sick of crappy SLI support in many games. Unfortunely, this was the peak of a cryptomining craze and many GPUs were never in stock or hideously overpriced. Looking around online at like 2am one night I came across an open box MSI 1080 Ti Gaming X at my local Microcenter for like $650. At this time, 1080 Ti's were selling for $1000+ if you could even find them. I picked it up at Microcenter when they opened a few hours later. It was barely an open box. The anti-static bag was still sealed and the game code for Destiny 2 was unused. Hell of a steal at that time. I'll get around to uploading a pic of the build with it soon.
It is now 2019 and my faithful overclocked 2600k is finally showing it's age. I got almost 8 years out of it and can still play current games at 1440p 60FPS if I don't mind turning the graphics to High instead of Ultra. Going to upgrade to (probably) a 9700k in the next month or two.