Question In the market for a $300-$400 CPU and other gaming components - should I hold off for now?

[MrEgo]

Hello everyone,

It's been awhile since the days of overclocking the hell out of my Athlon XP 2100+ with a Radeon 9700 Pro, so I have a lot of catching up to do. I'm back in the market for a gaming PC, but I'm a bit overwhelmed at what the options are right now. nVidia, AMD, and Intel appear to have some new stuff right around the corner, which it would seem likely to drive down prices of existing components once they are released. Here is some information that might help with some recommendations:

• My CPU budget is in the range of $300 to $450, but I would be willing to go slightly above if the value was right.
• I would like my motherboard to support the latest and greatest M.2 SSDs.
• My graphics card budget is not a hard set number, but I prefer to find the best value if there is good value in the $300 price range or the $500 price range.
• I'm currently running an i7-4790 with a GTX 980 - both are about 5 years old now.
• I'm using a Samsung 970 PRO SSD, but it doesn't appear that my motherboard's M.2 slot has the bandwidth available to really take full advantage of this SSD (~850 MBps read/write is what I'm getting now). It looks like NVMe is enabled.

I'm not necessarily in a huge hurry to upgrade, but in the next couple of months would be nice. Should I wait a few months for prices to come down (or are they not even expected to come down?)

Any help is appreciated. Thanks, Anandtech community.

 

[damian101]

I would definitely wait until RX 6000 GPUs and also Zen 3 CPUs /are released.
Zen 3 CPUs will most likely be quite a bit better in gaming than Zen 2 CPUs and will definitely take the gaming performance crown from Intel. But Zen 2 CPUs might still be worth considering if the prices drop.
And both the upcoming Nvidia and AMD GPUs will be a huge step in performance, and much more reasonably priced in the high-end thanks to AMD finally offering alternatives to Nvidias high-end GPUs.

 

[MalVeauX]

Heya,

For cost, look into:

AMD AM4 such as Ryzen 3900X CPU
DDR4 memory (16~32Gb)
x570 chipset motherboards (there are good ones that are reasonable cost; support what you want)
For GPU, look into RTX2060 for cost unless you want the latest release stuff and are willing to pay for it

Very best,