MewMus

Just a tiny gay creature θ∆

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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.


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in reply to @MewMus's post:

I've been seeing some pretty surprising numbers out of old Intel chips paired with more modern GPUs on Youtube lately. If you have one of those you could totally start with the GPU and get good results straight away, I bet.

Early gen Ryzen maybe not so much.

I'm unfortunately on an Intel i5-8600 atm which is a serious performance bottleneck and the cost of upgrading within this platform is nearly the same as a platform upgrade :/

Likewise, I'm not going to touch early Ryzen due to it not really making a difference in IPC compared to my current system.

That said, Ryzen 5000 series is getting really cheap whilst being a major performance upgrade in multicore and a minor upgrade in IPC, so I'm mostly looking at that.

At least here in AUS, 12th & 13th gen Intel is just not great value even compared to Ryzen 7000; and I'm just not keen on going for the crazy power-hungry 10th/11th gen, especially with how hot our summers are getting!

Yeah nah I was running a Ryzen 1700 for the longest time and it aged like warm milk

The 5600 that replaced it just sleeps through games, I've never seen it anywhere near maxed out. Outstanding value for money imho

Likewise!

Spectre/Meltdown/etc are all really spooky... I'm unfortunately in a situation though where I really do need to consider the CPU upgrade because my lacking performance is starting to get in the way of some work I want to do :/

I got unlucky with building my pc, I built it towards the end of the pandemic and bought my gpu while the chip shortage was ongoing, it was the last piece I needed and I was worried the prices would keep going up so I bit the bullet.
Hindsight, should’ve waited and should’ve gotten a smaller one too