When to build a Gaming PC?
The number one question I get on my weekly livestreams is “Should I wait for X” – right now it’s Zen 3 and RTX 3000 series GPUs, but what X is changes over time. In this video I want to explain why I almost always say no, and things to look out for when building, or buying a new pc.
When someone asks me if they should wait for a given part to be released, my answer is almost always no, and there are a few good reasons for that. First, the part is normally still months away from launching. There are normally a few rumours circulating about performance or pricing, but for example Zen 3 is expected to be quite late in 2020 meaning ‘holding off’ to buy means you are going to be waiting 3, 4, 5 months just for a newer CPU.
The next is that we don’t know how much better that new part will be. If it’s only 5% faster, you’ve waited an awfully long time for not much improvement. If it’s 20% faster, cool that’s great, but you can always sell your current hardware and buy the newer stuff instead, especially if you only bought it a few months earlier.
Then there is pricing, like we saw with NVIDIA’s RTX launch, we got 1080ti performance out of the 2080, for 1080ti money. Besides adding the RTX suite, there wasn’t much reason to buy a 2080 when you could buy a discounted 1080ti and get similar performance. That stands for all launches. AMD could jack the pricing up on Zen 3 based CPUs meaning you are better off buying a Zen 2 chip instead, and again you would have waited months just to buy what is already available.
The only exception is if a product is just about to launch, within the next week, maybe 2. In that case, you can normally expect to see pricing, reviews and availability within a short space of time and can make a reasonable decision based on that, then make your purchase.
This advice is mostly applicable to both new builds, and upgrades, although with upgrades you have a slightly different question – can you hold out on your current hardware for long enough? If you are struggling to run games at all, or maybe you’ve started streaming but your PC can’t handle it, then upgrading sooner rather than later will be best, but if you just have the itch to upgrade, or maybe want to upgrade your display to a higher resolution, then perhaps waiting is more viable.
That’s a lot more of a personal decision, but keep in mind that the performance improvement of new parts may not be worth waiting overly long for, plus there is almost always stock availability issues at launch so you might end up having to wait even longer too.
The bottom line is, of course, it’s up to you. If you are willing to wait half a year for a potential performance jump, then you do you. If all your after is “the best”, then you’ll be in an endless cycle of waiting for what’s next. My advice is buy what you want today, make use out of it, and upgrade to the new stuff when it comes out if it really is that much better.
Of course, there are also deals to find on existing parts, so keeping an eye on your local distributors for special events and the usual black friday type sales too. Some places do anniversary or even random sales, plus manufacturer funded discounts so keep an eye and see what you can find. PC Part Picker is a great tool for seeing pricing trends, and who is selling for the cheapest.
