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Comment by reactordev | Hacker News Reader

If you’re dropping that kind of cash, you definitely want to future proof it and not go with the budget lastgen motherboards.

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Future proofing is an expensive way to pay for features you don't need and will probably never use.

It's smarter to buy a cheap motherboard that meets your needs now. If in the future you find the need for USB4 or some other feature, upgrade the motherboard.

More often than not, builders will try to future proof for eventualities that don't arrive before it's time to upgrade to the next CPU socket anyway. There are a lot of people with expensive, outdated "futureproofed" builds who would have been better off saving the money on the original purchase so they could upgrade sooner instead.

This. In 2017 I bought the cheapest AM4 motherboard with a USB-C port (a Gigabyte X370 Aorus Word Salad). I'm still using it because BIOS updates gave it Zen 3 support.

Wanna guess how many times I've used that USB-C port? Maybe once or twice in the 9 years I've owned it. Never needed it. I also couldn't tell you what X370 is getting me that B350 wouldn't have gotten me.

It's a gamble. I take the opposite mindset now; scarcity mindset.

"$1600 is too much for a video card" - me a few years ago on not buying an RTX4090 from nvidia's website.

"I only need 32Gb of RAM. If I want more later, I'll just updgrade" - Me a year ago.

Both mistakes, with hindsight. I will always future proof from here on out.

Counterpoint:

"$100 is a reasonable amount for a video card, I know this is on the budget side but at least I have a card this way" — me 12 years ago.

"I guess it's worth it to spring for 8GB of RAM..." — me 12 years ago.

Still using the same machine, with no regrets (just the occasional bit of envy).

Different people have different expectations and requirements.

When you try to future proof, you are basically hedging. It’s a kind of insurance; sometimes it pays off, sometimes it does not. Having more disposable income now than I did 10 years ago I tend to pay more attention to this sort of things, but everyone can choose where they put the cursor. Someone who overestimated their RAM needs when buying a computer last year are probably pretty happy about it, but it could have swung the other way.

I future proofed by stepping back to high end components from last generation (except for GPU). My memory speed is slightly lower, but I have 32 cores and 128 GB ECC RAM on 4 channels. I doubt I will need to upgrade this thing any time soon for my typical use cases.

Note that this was before the RAM shortage, but I bet you could still do this now and save a little versus mid-tier current gen gear.

I would only agree if you already plan on doing major hardware upgrades within like 3 years at the latest. Past that and you will inevitably be missing new features that will be shipping even on budget hardware and won't be saving on anything.

Buy a $300 motherboard now in case you need future features, or buy a $100 motherboard now that does everything you currently need and then buy a second or even third $100 motherboard if you ever actually need those future improvements.

Then you get a new board designed for the new features instead of something several years old and you come out $100 on top.

Futureproofing is nonsense. PCs just don't work that way, and haven't for decades.

> Buy a $300 motherboard now in case you need future features, or buy a $100 motherboard now that does everything you currently need and then buy a second or even third $100 motherboard if you ever actually need those future improvements.

Right, but the problem is that by now your $100 new motherboard requires a new CPU and new RAM. Which is very much not $100.

In the past we got away with PCI cards to add features without changing the motherboard, but we still ended up changing everything every 2 years anyway…

The only 2 parts that even make sence to "future proof" are power supply and case.

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