European here. I’m pretty content with my setup (Ryzen5 3600XT, 16GB RAM, GTX 1060… I play in 1080p) for the games I’m playing at the moment, and I don’t plan on playing many AAAA games in the future. BUT. With the recent tariffs flying around, China denying rare earths, etc etc I fear we might see an increase in hardware prices like we had with covid, so I was thinking on upgrading at least CPU+VGA; more than FOMO let’s say is Fear Of Being Overpriced. What do you think, should I upgrade now that things looks a little more relaxed? Will the whole mess involve only the USA or everyone cause globalization?

  • Nyctfall@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    16 hours ago

    Just make a decision tree of all possibilities:

    • You stay with your current build, and we get a replay of the silicon shortage. Are you content?
    • You stay with your current build, and prices go back to normal. Are you content?
    • You upgrade your build, and we get a replay of the silicon shortage. Are you content?
    • You upgrade your build, and prices go back to normal. Are you content?

    Some things to think about:

    AM4 is technically a “dead” platform. So unless AMD finally decides to release the Ryzen 9 5900X3D, upgrades will cap out at either a 5800X3D for gaming, or a 5950X for productivity.

    The GeForce GTX 1060 only has 6GB of VRAM, so it’ll be in 1080p “Low” graphics settings territory soon.

    There are some gaming performance differences with 16GB of system RAM vs 32GB of system RAM. But it will matter much more for multitasking and productivity workloads. A dual-rank dual-channel DDR4-3600 CL16 memory config is optimal for non-APU Ryzen.

    My personal choice is to upgrade to a GPU with a modern amount of VRAM, at least 12GB (but preferably 16GB).
    An Intel ARC “Battlemage” B580 12GB or the ARC “Alchemist” A770 16GB may be the cheapest (note that ARC GPUs currently have 30W-45W idle power draw).
    But an AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT, 7700 XT, 7800 XT, 7900 GRE/XT/XTX would also work well (but there is a hardware bug in the AV1 media encoder: AMD ReLive VCN4 1082p bug).
    Nvidia is too greedy to offer many reasonable VRAM configurations, there are also tons of gimped versions of most of their popular cards to be wary of. There’s the RTX 3060 12GB (NOT THE 8GB version), RTX 3080 12GB (NOT 10GB version)/RTX 3080 Ti, RTX 3090, RTX 4060 Ti 16GB (NOT 8GB version), RTX 4070 Super, RTX 4070 Ti Super, RTX 4080 Super, and RTX 4090.

    Useful resources:
    TechSpot
    Hardware Unboxed (YouTube)
    Hardware Canucks (YouTube)
    Level1Techs (also on YouTube)
    Gamer’s Nexus (also on YouTube)