(PCGT VI) It's not just about hardware

5600X and 5800Xs are available on Amazon right now if you hurry.

OK, my brother in law wants to build a PC. He has a budget of £1,500 and needs everything. he wants to be able to play the newest gooseberry fool and not need an upgrade got a long while.

£1,500 is alsmot enough to cover the graphics card.

That's what I was thinking :lol:

Sorry I realise that's massively unhelpful, but my experience when looking at how much it would be to upgrade to the latest stuff. My pc has a 1070 and it can run everything pretty well still, but it won't be great for much longer.

The problem is even the manufacturers are raising the prices of GPUs and CPUs now because stock is so low. Probably best off waiting until towards the end of this year unless he needs a PC immediately.

Also if he doesn't have a good high resolution and high refresh rate monitor, he's going to need to buy one to really take advantage of the new machine. So that's another £300.

Has he got anything already - Case? PSU? Monitor etc?

£1500 should be enough to make a very capable machine even working from scratch, but it won't be getting him into the uber leagues.

Pedz wrote:OK, my brother in law wants to build a PC. He has a budget of £1,500 and needs everything. he wants to be able to play the newest gooseberry fool and not need an upgrade got a long while.

https://www.logicalincrements.com/

Should be able to hit the Superb tier on this and have enough left for a decent monitor. Not sure what other peripherals he'll need, so may need to bump down to Great or Very Good tier for similar performance.

Note that the CPU and GPU in these tiers are not the latest generation due to the cost and availability issues mentioned above, but he'll still get good gaming performance from them.

Personally I would look to juggle some of the other components in order to bump up the GPU (and possibly CPU) from that tier, but yeah Logical Increments is a great starting place to get a feel for where you can aim

Thanks guys.

I know it's not actually a big deal in the grand scheme of things but I'm getting quite irritated by lack of GPU and CPU stock. I want to upgrade, still running an FE 1080 and there are games I don't want to compromise on quality or framerate when playing so I'm just waiting. Forever. My ultrawide 144hz monitor is starting to get blue balls.

Currys' website is also strawberry floating abysmal, I'm signed up to stockinformer and get a Windows notification if anywhere has any 3080's in stock. I'll get three or four notifications a day from Currys, all because one store somewhere in the country has one in stock for collection only.

I've never seen 3080s in stock anywhere. 3070s and 3090s will turn up (Scan has some 3090s right now) but no 3080s.

I was incredibly lucky with my 3080FE. I was on a stock checker discord at the instant a notification came up for a French store that had one at RRP. I think it was up for about 15 minutes before all stock went but I managed to get one.

I periodically check CCL then promptly close the tab once I see all the out of stock 3080s listed for a minimum of £850.

Hardware prices are insane at the moment.
I used to think £400 graphics cards were silly money but that just seems like a standard price now.
I know this was well over a decade ago but I when I built my old PC I had a budget of £600 and while it couldn't get me top end stuff it was still enough to make a decent machine.

GPU budgets are definitely the part that has inflated the most, or at least that's how it seems.

The first "discrete" GPU I bought was a 3DFX Voodoo 1 in I think 1997 or 98 and it cost about £75.

Next was a Radeon 9800 in 2003 which I got for about £180

Then I moved to team green in 2007 and got a GeForce GTX 8800 GTS for about £200

I upgraded that in 2010 to a Radeon HD 5770 for the bargain price of £130

I flipped back to Nvidia for the beast that was the GTX 970 for what felt like a massive £275 in 2014

Then at the end of 2019 I bought an RTX 2070 Super for £420!

Yeah I was similar price points until the 970 felt too expensive for me at the time. Now I wish I could get a 3070 for less than 300 quid, that would be incredible.

Every time I remember I spent £750 on a GPU I shiver.

Worth it though.

£200 for my RX 580 feels like even more of a bargain now than it did at the time.

(PCGT VI) It's not just about hardware

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