Dude I bought a GTX980 like six months ago for like $350. A replacement card for my six-year-old Mac Pro was $450. Frickin' PC stuff is always cheap. Y'all don't know how good you have it. Especially when your year-old Mac Mini has a corrupt hard drive, and Apple has not only slapped a proprietary connector on it, they've slapped proprietary firmware, so you can't even swap the bitch out without bringing it to the genius bar. Apple and I are rapidly parting company. Thinking of building an XPenology box to replace it. Could probably just grab some piece of shit off Woot and install, but I kinda want a decent video card on it so it'll transcode Plex with alacrity (the Mac Mini doesn't transcode worth a shit either).
About every 4-5 years I do a ton of research and drop $2-$3K on a game rig. I have an i7 and 32GB of RAM build in 2012 according to Newegg that is laughing at everything I throw at it. I'm starting to get less than 60FPS at 1920x1200 so it is time to slap in a video card or two and another 10TB of storage for the astronomy camera stuff and I'll be good for at least 2 more years. MAC hardware is expensive by design to prevent people from messing with it. One of the reasons that MAC machines are good is that they are all the same hardware, making it easier to do driver support, as well as tech support. But as a guy sitting here with the two sides off the game rig playing with the cable runs to make it look nicer and easier to access for when I get the new video card(s) next month, I'd go bonkers on a closed ecosystem like MAC.
There was a good one for a while after the switch to Intel. Mac Pros used nVidia and ATI video cards. There were PCIe soundcards you could throw in there. But yeah. There was about a 6 year period where you could legitimately run Mac hardware as if it were PC hardware, and that era is done.