/me sighs. I need to come up with an excuse to upgrade…
holy fuck it's horribly expensive these days.
I'd love for me to be able to just run all my builds on full blast on a 24 core beast at home, but if your interests also include games, you're looking at multiple thousands just to upgrade. Needless to say, my apartment, family, vacations and a dozen other things are well above in the priority list.
* $500 for a CPU (7800X starts at $450)
* $60 for a cooler because the Wraith Prism is shit.
* $200 for a motherboard, maybe $100 if you want to try to cheap out and get something that might have unstable voltages, shit PCIe bandwidth or no NVMe slots, etc.
* $200 for 32GB of quality DDR5-4800 (or 5600 if you want to be fancy), and that's easily used up these days.
* $200 for a quality 750W power supply
* $100 for a case with good enough airflow, assuming you don't already have one.
* $200+ for at least 1TB of NVMe storage, easily much more
So, assuming a new build that didn't get incremental upgrades in the past, building a new, powerful PC these days is going to run you $1500. Without even picking any top of the line stuff. Guess what didn't get included in there ? GPUs with their bloody ridiculous prices. If you're going with NVidia, this 4000 generation is a waste if you're buying anything but the 4090. You could absolutely buy a 4080 (or rather a 4070Ti), or a 4070, but they're such a horrible deal in terms of price/performance. And that's going to cost you at the absolute least $800 (for a 4070, which is a dogshit card). Or you can try to find a series 3000, but that's also going to run you $1000+. If you're going with AMD, your problems are similar, for cards that are really subpar. As for Intel, well, let's just say an A770 with your high end CPU might cause a few bottlenecks here and there.
So, yes, if you're lucky enough to find deals _and_ to have stuff that you can still use from an old, recent rig, sure, building a new PC isn't _that_ expensive. If you have to do major upgrades, you're looking at multiple thousands. Pulling that much money out in one go for something that is ultimately not extremely necessary is something that can only be afforded by a very small percentage of people.
And if you already have an older rig… just bring it over from that.
So, no, any upgrade not done in the last 5 years means pretty much a full rebuild now. New sockets + DDR5 means that your old build is going to hit a brick wall.
Your old PSU might be insufficient for the new build, but it's not like 750W PSUs are a new thing (or particularly required if you're not doing a high-end build, even today). Power efficiency tends to yoyo around over the years.
No, you absolutely do not "need" to upgrade your GPU, and certainly not immediately. Your old GPU will not be doing a worse job in the new computer than it was in the old one. And you can always replace it later on, should the need actually arise.
I think a core part of the misunderstanding here is around expectations. The build plan for "a top-spec gaming computer" is going to look pretty different from "a top-spec dev computer that I can also game on". But, if anything, gaming has hit seriously diminishing returns in the last couple of years. It's quite hilarious and sad to see NVidia try to make real-time path tracing and 4K gaming into things, in a desperate bid to make GPU performance a relevant factor again.
The only compromise compared to the last gen is unfortunately the RAM - 64GB this gen compared to 128GB last, until they sort out DDR5 4-DIMM dual-rank configs..
So you need to be paid ~$30/h to recoup the cost in a year.
Of course if you're contractor it means you will... earn less unless you bump the price but that's the "motivation" of being paid by hour...
Pretty motherboards with 110% of desired featureset: Insert Fresh Kidney and/or Lung
I just built an i9-13900K replaced the LGA1366 2P board in it. It's an astounding performance bump, to mildly put it lol. I plan on using this chassis with this setup for probably another 5-10 years before upgrading again.
refs?
Case I’m using is a SC743TQ-1200B-SQ
I love it. I have 6 more of them that I use for various things (3 are dedicated to my plex cluster).
The case having a transparent side panel, on the other hand...
So I tend to end up buying something on the higher end even if I'm not using all the board's features. My current tower uses an ASUS ProArt X570 Creator.
My last build: MSI MAG X570 $200, Ryzen 9 5900X $400, G.Skill 2x16GB DDR4 3600Mhz CL16 $165, Samsung 980 Pro 1TB $150 = $915
That's not a budget build by any means, but it's also not crazy when compared to previous builds in that tier over the past 15 years.
That wasn't the first computer I owned, just the first one I built. I am sure some really old timers remember the ones that cost more that $5K.
For the base model.
I built about half a dozen machines from parts since 1998 and it was almost a constant to spend $650-800 for a mid-range machine for about 20 of those years. This includes everything but a monitor, but it does include a decent video card.
His part list for $915 doesn't include a video card. With today's market a mid-range card will put you at a grand total of about $1,250-1,300. That's approaching 2x the cost of a solid mid-range machine that you could build 8 years ago.
Here's a couple of line items from my last part purchase in 2014:
- Intel Core i5-4460 LGA 1150 CPU $182
- Crucial MX100 256GB SSD $105
- Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO $35
The exact CPU and SSD aren't worth price comparing because no one would buy them today since we have way better hardware at similar price points. For ~$180 you can grab a Ryzen 7 5700G and a 1TB SSD is about the same price as 256GB from back then. That feels like it's on a higher end of mid-range for today. It's really video cards where you get killed.
Spent $290 in April 2020 for a Radeon RX 5600 XT - a few steps below the top end $400 5700 XT!
The 6600 XT is actually about that much now, which isn't awful. But it's also increasingly far from the top end (behind the 6700 XT, 6800, 6900 XT, 7900 XT, 7900 XTX) and those range in price from $350 to $1000!
I lost my invoice for my video card but it's a GeForce GTX 750 Ti. I'm pretty sure it was around $150 went I got it. It's not the best thing in the world and today it's good enough to casually play some older games. It has no problem powering multiple 1440p displays which is why I continue to use it. For its time when I got it in 2015 it was maybe middle of the pack as a mid-range card. Playing those era games at 60 FPS at 1080p is fine.
Nowadays, forget about getting anything near that price point even though every other piece of hardware has huge upgrades at similar price points as back then (as seen with my previous post on CPUs and SSDs). It's especially bad too because almost 10 years has passed. Expectations have rose. Nowadays you would hope to be able to have a 1440p display running at 120+ hz and be able to play games at that resolution at 120+ fps.
Today you're looking at something like $300 to get a comparable card relative to what's available today vs back then. I haven't done the research on what's the best card in that range but a GTX 2060 is about $300 nowadays but it also retailed at about that price in 2019. In theory it should have dropped by now since there's been multiple new generations since then.
I've seen a bit of apologia for this, claiming that costs have risen so of course prices would increase as well. But prices are going up so much faster than inflation that I'm not sure that passes the sniff test. We should see 4080s for $850-$900, not $1200.
All of this just in time for 30-series supplies to dwindle ... new 3080s are back up to the $1k mark. Sigh.
4.35 a day isn't cheap, but I was spending more than that on starbucks everyday. So I stopped spending 10 dollars a day at Starbucks and opted for the rolls royce. I have a nicer rig, I'm healthier not drinking starbucks, and I'm saving a little money even if we factor in electricity costs.
I fully expected my data management software to be much faster on the new hardware since it uses multi-threading to make use of all those wonderful cores, but it blew me away just how fast it is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVICKCkWMZE
I might have to bite the bullet later this year if the 7950X3D benchmarks look really good once it releases.
I'm on a 3900x and 2070 Super. I mostly reduced using the desktop when I got the M1 and M1 Pro devices. I now use it remotely from another room in the house. I'll hold out despite the temptations, and only update in 2-3 more years from now.