For "next gen", when is the best time to start buying?

BoboTheMighty

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Kind of thinking of new build, for 2077 and whatnot. Not right now, of course, but keeping an eye on it.
From what I hear, GPU prices are slowly going back to normal.
Next Ryzen seems like a pretty big ( potential upgrade). And RAM? Seems they're still pretty high, no mention of when they'll go back to normal.
So around one year or so? Any predictions on this?
 
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RAM is ridiculously expensive right now. I was looking at some the other day, and I almost couldn't believe the current prices. 32 GB of DDR 4 costs more than a high-end CPU!

Kind of hard to predict what's going to happen. Hopefully CPUs stay cheap and the price of RAM comes down. Good GPUs are always going to be expensive.
 
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Forget 32Gb, no game in near future on PC will need that. Especially a game coming from CDprojekt.

Unless you're planning to degrade frames per second and watch a slideshow in 4K, 8Gb of RAM is enough. But in such case you shouldn't buy PC at all. Get yourself a nice Nintendo Gameboy instead.
The only game that says minimum 16Gb of RAM lies upfront to customers and god knows when it'll be released - Star Citizen.
But there is a catch. While 8Gb as such in a gaming rig is okay, don't tell me you never use 7zip or winrar. These two utils work faster when you're rich with RAM. Any installer based on them also work faster. So while you won't be utilizing 16Gb all the time, it's still nice to have.
Just to be safe and not milked, buy 8Gb right away and add another 8Gb later.

CPU is easy. Quadcore with 3+ Ghz is a must for years now, hexacore is even better. The day you decide to buy check prices on CPUs and motherboards then pick whichever is cheaper. It's CDpr we're talking about, their code is not unoptimized Ubisoft garbage.
Do not buy i7 nor threadripper! Or i9 or those 24+ cores CPUs. Unless you're projecting houses. Since you're not, go for i5 or R5(2).

With GPUs it is impossible to know today. Sorry. Next generations are coming out soon. It's still unknown if the game will use TressFX or Hairworks. Or even both. You'll just make sure the card can run what the game will offer.

Then I have to mention SSD. Seen some people still skip buying it. Do not even think about saving that for later!
Don't fall into a trap of advertisments about SSD speed. You won't notice any difference between them in real world, so when it comes to SSD, buy the cheapest one. When you see a discount, don't jump on it instantly because some SSDs are much more expensive than others even with discount. For no reason - you're paying for the name on a sticker.

HDD and optical media drive… You don't need those any more inside the rig. Buy external USB ones. Which also means the case needs to have at least two USB 3.0 ports at it's front side. And fans inside. 2-3 fans at least. Built-in.

For PUBG and crap like that you'll also need headphones with mic. Pick Sennheiser if you can, if not, any rubbish will do the trick. Pick wireless ones only if you'll play games on wireless k+m, otherwise doesn't matter.

wi-fi gadget? Airlive WL1700 and Alfa awus036h are history and you need one of these only if your router is 5 kilometers away. Both are still unbeatable when it comes to utilizing 24dbi antennas, but you're not doing some tourism or shady business, right? :p
Since you're not that far away from a router, pick usb-N14 from Asus, when it comes to home use it cannot fail. Wire? Nah. No reason unless your internet provider screwed the router's firmware.

Mushrooms? I don't see any reason to torment yourself with that. It's CDprojekt. Not whomever ported Neptunia onto PC.
 
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The best time to upgrade for 2077 is as close to release as possible!

I would guess Christmas 2019 release at the earliest?

The new gtx 1180 or whatever it will be called will be out well before then. I think they have some sort of little co-processor that crypto miners want and is needed for that UE4 ray tracing demo with the storm troopers? With DDR6 ram, was it? Either way, don't buy this gen GPU.

I haven't played with a Ryzen CPU but the benchmarks look good. 1600x under 0.2% bottleneck on a 1080 or something. They're only $250. Could be worth a look but I'm still waiting to hear about CPUs without critical security issues. Don't buy this gen CPU. :)
 
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If you live in USA micro center usually has really good deals on cpu/mb on black friday weekend. newegg has good deals on psu cyber monday. I'd target ice lake which is late 2018 or amd. One of these days ssd will be really cheap but mx500 is not bad.
 
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