Build and upgrade strategy

[Yeezey]

Previously I have been buying at mid range, budgeting around £700-£800 to upgrade my core components – Motherboard, CPU, RAM and graphics. “Upgrade” is a loose term here… when 3 years is up it seems everything needs an overhaul and the components I do have are near worthless second hand so I end up building from scratch every time.


I am looking to adopt a cycle where I can upgrade one or two components frequently where I am able to buy and sell components at the right time. As an example, I am thinking I need to buy and sell a high end graphics card every 2 years.


For people who are tight with money like me, what is everyone’s cost effective strategy for ensuring their build stays current and is capable of playing the newest games?

 

[NovaKill4]

Hi and welcome to the forums,

I am running an 7-8 year old CPU and it runs perfectly well for most games, I am looking at upgrading now but im not in a rush, I upgraded my GPU about 18 months ago which helped a lot.

If you buy a high end system now I would suspect it would last the same amount of time. There is no "need" to upgrade every 3 years, thats just what you would like to do.

However this may change now that AMD is back and better than ever, as Intel previously dominated the market they only released mild performance gains per generation, they cant keep doing this now that AMD have them by the balls.

Similar situation with GPU's but maybe not as bad.

At the end of the day, buy the best you can afford at the time and when thats no longer fast enough sell it and buy the best you can afford again.

 

[Grafter67]

AMD's am4 motherboards are guaranteed by them to last for at least their 2020 processors and their 2019's (and 2018's and 2017's) are much better value (imo) than intel, so that's your starting point.

The cpu's start at £50 and go up to £560 or so and there's a healthy 2nd hand market for them due to the motherboard compatibilty.