I agree. I do not foresee prices dropping much. I do foresee scarcity of parts. One of the components I was looking at was 49% off. Could not pass it up so I have begun the purchasing process. Looking for sales and markdowns and not aiming for a top-tier but upper mid-tier.
My current one served me well but my card is feeling its age. It is min spec for the new Jedi game. And my motherboard only supports the old TPM so, it is time.
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Nice article
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I have a regular suppler of computer parts. Iâve used them for the last 30 years. Theyâve just sent me this advert:
12 months ago, if you wanted a graphics card at any price, you had to find the CEO of Nvidia, and kidnap his children. Now theyâre offering trade-ins.
This strongly suggests to me that the market has been so overpriced for so long, that manufacturers are now having trouble selling stuff. I would expect prices to come down soon.
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I ordered the 3 components I mentioned earlier. They were bundled together and one was 49% off. Cost me only $100 more than I spent on my current PC and is quite a lot better in performance. I still need some RAM and see if my heatsink will work and I need a copy of Win11. Everything else I have should be useable. Just waiting for a day to pack it all into my case. I am seeing a lot of sales. Ordered my stuff straight thru AMDâs store on Amazon. I believe a huge downturn in crypto has led to overstock. Be very, very wary of buying anything used. It could have been used in crypto and therefore nearly worn out.
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I never thought about that, hardware can wear out?! For me it always stopped being supported (or became too slow) before it ever burned out 
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Itâs not an exact science. More like gambling. AFAIK Hardware lifetime is defined in percent per year. Which means the average percentage of produced components that are still working after x years. the one and two year periods usually have a very high percentage (though not quite 100), then it often starts declining. It usually never reaches zero, though. So if youâre lucky, you can have a piece of hardware that soldiers on your entire lifetime. Or you can have one that just stops working a week after leaving the factoryâŚ
In general, higher-performing components have a steeper drop-off in that curve after a certain time than lower-performing components. Thereâs also the fun fact that often the curve starts to level out again after a certain time, which means that if the component is older than a certain time, itâs actually pretty likely it will keep surviving.
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Electronic components have a design lifetime. Provided they are used well within their safe operating parameters, modern silicon devices (unlike their old germanium counterparts) are very reliable. Other components like resistors (fairly long life) and capacitors (short life) will wear out in time.
The crucial thing here is âused well within their safe operating parametersâ. The main killer of electronics is heat. Besides the obvious burning of electrical pathways, heat also causes chemical changes in delicate semiconductors, and causes tiny cracks to grow in electrical connections. The hotter electronic components get, the faster they fail - and the more you push them for greater performance, the hotter they get.
This is the main problem with graphics cards used by crypto miners. They overclock the cards, the software they use addresses all the cores, all the time, so they get very hot. Then they run the cards 24/7 for years. These cards get the maximum heat stress, and the maximum abuse.
Crypto miners are not the most ethical people in the world (if they were, they wouldnât be crypto miners). When their cards develop faults, they sell them off on the second-hand market. If theyâve kept the original boxes, they will sometimes sell them as new.
Especially in the current climate, I would advise anybody looking for a graphics card to only buy from a known, trusted supplier.
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And different hardware ages differently.
Solid state drives (SSD), including flash drives, age based on the number of IO actions. An HDD ages primarily by time in use.
So software that reduces IO can lengthen the life of SSDs.
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Thatâs because the data in non-volatile flash memory is stored using a technique known as âelectron trappingâ where extra oxide layers inside a MOSFET transistor form what is, in effect, a tiny capacitor. Itâs this capacitor that breaks down after multiple uses, making the cell unable to store charge.
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These new photos are adding priority to my ordering a new PC.
[Got the monitor, just need to decide among a few desktop tower options â Iâm going for an NVIDIA RTX 4070 or better card, 32GN RAM, 2TB disk. Not sure whether to order a 2TB HDD or 2 of 1TB SSD. Iâve been used to one large HDD.]
@toddumptious - the upside-down building (Archive?) and water reflection photo is cool!
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I would say definitely go with the SSD. I feel like I get more done with my day not staring at loading screens anymore. I still have my HDD in my PC but use it to store stuff that doesnât need immediate read/write access, with software/windows running from SSD.
I got my pc in 2015, low to mid end for its time, about 2 or 3 years ago booting windows started taking 10-15 minutes especially with a new antivirus Iâd purchased.
I got my first SSD a little over a year ago and my pc boots to login in 15 seconds now 
Iâm sure it wasnât just deteriorating tech on my end and Microsoft changing windows workflow to work with SSD in mind was introducing a bottleneck for HDD I would assume.
A lot of games seem to be leaning this way too with texture streaming etc almost needing SSD as a requirement to avoid nagging and performance lag
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Solid State 4 Ever!
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I know SSDs are superior to HDDs in almost every repect. I also know that HDDs donât last forever.
However, SSDs are actually designed to fail. The manufacturers know that they will begin to break down after only a short use. So much so, that SSDs have a built-in redundancy and data recovery system. While you are using them, they are constantly failing, and constantly repairing themselves.
Unfortunately, this self-repair system has a limited lifespan. Eventually, an SSD will run out of spare storage space to call into service - and at that point, it will just stop working. And you lose everything thatâs on it.
HDDs may be slow and clunky by modern standards, but they can last many years - I have some that are 30 years old, and are still chugging along. When they fail, they tend to fail slowly, with lots of warning, so you get the chance to save most of your data.
I like the convenience of SSDs - but I always back up to HDD.
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I feel you, i have so much fomo since the worlds ii release, not having a device to play on 
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In the UK, there doesnât seem to be a huge difference in price between 2 x 1Tb SSDs and a single 2 Tb SSD. When you jump to 4 Tb, the price difference is significant.
Modern gaming motherboards are quite limited as to what you can plug into them. They donât have as many expansion slots as PCs used to. This is partly because modern graphics cards eat up so much of the system bus bandwidth, you can only have a limited number of fast storage drives and still maintain system performance.
Modern gaming cases donât even have a bay for a CD / DVD drive - theyâre not considered necessary any more.
The last gaming PC I built was around 12 months ago, made for my grandson. That has a 2 Tb SSD, and a 6 Tb HDD. For the size, the HDD was ridiculously cheap. Obviously, the HDD is not fast enough for a modern operating system or for games, but itâs great for backup, and for storing movies and pictures.
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I found a case with a drive slot. I demand it. I still burn music discs. Not for myself because my car uses USB. But for a lot of older people who still use CD players.
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Oh, you can still get them - but theyâre not plentiful, and theyâre listed as âoffice PC casesâ or similar. They tend to lack the necessary add-ons found in gaming cases, like mountings for water cooling kit and big cooling fans. On the plus side, they donât have fairy lights - which is always a blessing.
(edit) This discussion is wandering a bit from screenshots, isnât it? If it continues, maybe we do it elsewhere.
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Hey I just did a DNA test and I think Iâm also your grandson now⌠My birthdays next month. Thanks grandad 
I actually did just buy a cheap little tower from curries/Pc world for my dad.
Intel i5 and a 250gb SSD with integrated graphics.
He doesnât need much but the PC heâs using is from 2011, has win 8 and even just opening chrome can take what feels like 15 minutes. I didnât have the patience to troubleshoot it as any action was followed by a thirty second wait⌠So I just got him a new one 
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Agree. Perhaps a new thread for gaming equipment?
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