It's just something I do mostly out of habit at this point as I watched everything be unattainably expensive through the flash memory crisis and then the pandemic of the last half-decade.
Things are interesting at the moment though. Because there was a huge boom in parts purchasing as everyone needed work-from-home setups or at least PC upgrades through covid, every manufacturer over-produced stock. This is especially true of GPUs as Nvidia and AMD tried to cash in on the concurrent NFT/Crypto boom at the same time.
But both of these things crashed because of course they did. There is a finite number of people who had to get a new setup for work-from-home and as the years have rolled by most businesses are back to work in person. What this means for the tech landscape though is the major companies are timid about new releases as they have far too much old inventory and their old inventory is still too good compared to the new offerings. As such (especially here in Australia) retailers are heavily discounting "last-gen" in order to try and clear shelves so they can hopefully reap some sales of "current-gen" towards the end of their lifetime.
This bursting bubble is pretty advantageous for folks who held out through the whole pandemic on an upgrade and are okay with slightly older hardware. I know this lul won't last forever though. So my passive activity of routinely checking hardware prices is quickly becoming a shopping list as I try to figure out how to finance an upgrade for my current system that is really starting to feel its age.
I'm currently looking at around $1250 - $1750 AUD ($800 - $1120 USD) for a substantial upgrade to my current rig; which currently struggles to play Genshin and watch a youtube video at the same time.
An ideal setup where I replace even more than the bare minimum so that I can finally have a nice-looking power-efficient quiet mini-ITX system and also get some peripheral upgrades I've been eyeing for a long time as well would be in the neighbourhood of $2700 AUD ($1720 USD)
It's unlikely that I'll pull the trigger on this any time soon, especially as financing that much at the moment is extremely difficult/unlikely. But I'll be continuing to monitor everything closely and try not to miss this golden opportunity whilst it's here.


