How much is too much to spend on a graphics card?

[captaincranky]

I know many of you will sneer at a "lowly" entry-level GeForce GT 1030 with "only" 2 GB of GDDR5....but honestly, given that MY gaming consists almost entirely of mid-to-late 90s/early-to-mid 'noughties' retro gaming (think Doom, Duke Nukem, Quake 1+2+3, etc., and other related games using the same engines), I really don't NEED anything more than that.

Those GT-1030 are miracle cards, but not for gaming. (I don't game anyway.
I used to buy them from B & H Photo for $99.00 a pop.

What they do "best" (IMHO), is extend the amount of tabs you can have open on the web, especially on machine that only have 8 GB of RAM. They seem to completely prevent problems where an IGP is hogging RAM, or writing to the OS drive.

FWIW, on a truly "elder" machine of mine C2D-7200 / 8GB RAM, I installed a GT-710. After about 10 tabs open, the screen would go black. Enter a GT-730 which got me to about 20 or so tabs until a dead screen. With the GT-1030, on a good day I can get close to 200 tabs open. You wouldn't think there would be that big a difference, but there truly was. I tried to buy a couple more of them for backup, but at that point they were OOS and discontinued.

Should someone not be too proud to game @720p, I hear the 1030s are pretty good at that too

The other chilluns made funz of me for buying a GTX-1650 and a GTX-1650ti after the last GPU famine. Paid about $200.00 a pop. (long story) The very next order Newegg got in, I think the GTX-1650 was up to $279.00.