I know what you mean it’s like a never ending cycle and slowly but surely you’ve swapped out nearly every bit of hardware you have due to hype
usually at the top of it buying the best of things but over the past year it’s becoming to often so I have slowed right down and find things I’m “happy” with instead of what’s the best thing available. I can only imagine the price of the new cards if or when they get announced
The announcement is on the 20th of this month. I think we’ll see more expensive, but not insane. With exceptional performance. Though I can’t say what miners, dram pricing and gouging will do to MSRPs, nothing good that’s for sure.
High prices initially will probably be partly to push sales of the remaining 10 series. I think we’ll see a price drop after a few months when the old stock has mostly cleared.
CPUs have been more than enough at the top end for quite some time. My 4790K is still a very capable chip, and I see no reason to upgrade any time soon. The core count race will certainly influence games down the line, where I think we’ll see core count benefiting performance more than IPC, but imo that’s quite some time down the road, and I won’t be upgrading for at least another 2 years. Considering that’s a 4 year old chip already I think that’s pretty awesome.
As for monitors I tend to spend a lot, but for a long time now I don’t think they’ve been worth their high asking prices considering the compromises; blb, glow, motion blur, crushed blacks, overshoot, response time etc. With HDR, FALD and Quantum Dot we’re finally seeing properly awesome monitors without as many caveats. If I have to pay £1800 for a 4K/UW with all the bells and whistles then so be it, it’ll likely last ten years.
GPUs on the other hand get old fast, and the lower end ones even faster. We all have to make our own judgement on the value of our expenditure, knowing it’ll be worth comparably little two generations down the line. For me that used to mean *80 sli. Now it means the ti or Titan. I cannot justify the expense of the latter!
For me the limit is around £850. It still blows my mind that this number is acceptable to me. Blows my mind even more that people are still paying more than that right now for a 2 year old product. If I can’t get a ti for that then I’ll hold off the gpu and monitor upgrade until that sort of money can buy you minimum 80 FPS at 4K.
When I was first building gaming PCs a grand would buy you a monster. It’s utterly bonkers to me that I could barely get above an entry level system with that kind of money these days. £3,000 is about right for a top end gaming build now, and that’s just for the box. It’s insane, and yet we all go along with it, and I’m about as bad as anyone.
If I had to build new rig right now, I wouldn’t. The cost of entry is just too high and consoles too convenient. But I was indoctrinated many years ago and have a decent enough machine that I can just upgrade gradually and keep my sanity. I’m gobsmacked young people are still getting into it given the obscene cost of entry. YouTube streamers probably help.
Anyway, stupidly long post. My bad