Quote:
Originally Posted by Pants
It's still a ridiculous amount to spend on a GPU and I kind of hate myself for doing it, but you can now get an RTX 4080 for like $1,100, guys.
M.2 SSDs are super cheap. I mean you can get an incredibly good 1 TB 980 Pro for like $80.
ATX 3.0 power supplies are now reasonable.
DDR5 memory is "cheap" cheap.
If you have a Micro Center near you, they have insane bundles that don't even make sense. I mean an i7 13700K + a nice Asus mobo + 32GBs of DDR5 RAM is $549. HOW?
Less than 2 years ago, people were paying $2,000 for RTX 3060 systems.
Now, for $2000 you get a goddamn beast that will slice through 1440 max settings with crazy FPS like it's damn 720.
14th gen Intel is about to come out and will be a new socket and that's probably the only drawback of building now. Or you can just go with an AM5 Ryzen and be set for the foreseeable future.
It really is a great time for PCs again. Or maybe it just feels like it after the great COVID shortages and scalping. Rebounding is real.
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This is the way. My setup was running fine, and I didn't really need to upgrade, but prices have been so incredible I bit the bullet last week as well. My previous setup was starting to get slightly CPU bottlenecked in some new games.
I just upgraded MOBO/CPU/RAM/CPU fan/case fans. MOBO I purchased for 60% off. The RAM had been $289 dollars for months on my Amazon wish list, and suddenly dropped to $104. Even Microcenter has prices on products that are now hundreds of dollars lower at the register compared to what the sticker price says. Sporting 3 NVME drives, for Windows and gaming storage. 2 large SSDs for general data storage.
New setup is pretty ****ing impressive. ASUS AIOC is just as cool as I expected. You basically turn on AI monitoring in BIOS, and run some stress tests in the OS on your system. The mobo uses AI to dynamically learn your system's capabilities/cooling over time, and will constantly adjust an overclock as aggressively as you want to. I'm currently running an i5-12600K at 5.3Ghz, and my CPU is at 35 degrees. Under heavy load, it dips down to ~5Ghz at most. At really heavy load, it dips down to 4.7-4.8ish.
Haven't topped 70 degrees even in stress tests. It basically adjusts your performance as much as possible depending on the load and cooling at the present time. And finally consolidated all PC RGB lighting to a single ASUS Aura source. Feels good.
New PC equipment is expensive, but damn if it isn't satisfying once you see the results.