Confused, scarcity and obsolescence

terley · 4 May 2022 at 11:15

really confused with the PC component market atm..

Most motherboards still only support DDR4, i doubt you can buy a prebuilt that hasn't been customized that supports DDR5 as it is brand new, yet DDR6 has been still heavily teased for the past couple of years..

So most people buying new rigs could be purchasing PC's with 2 generation out of date memory..

Despite the best gaming CPU on the market atm being the AMD Ryzen 7 5800x 3D, only released last month.. with the 6xxx series CPU's rumoured to release very soon...

Never seen new tech releasing so fast.. mixing scarcity of supply with such short obsolescence can't be good for the PC enthusiast market.

After not upgrading for a while, still stuck with an i7 6700k and a gtx 1080ti, its generally daunting and quite frustrating not knowing if its a good idea or not to upgrade..

With PC components there is always the knowledge that your rig will be outdated reasonably quickly, but right now it seems to be worse than ever.

OspreyO · 4 May 2022 at 11:32

Unless there something you can't do with your rig its not outdated.

How fast you can do something is all relative, to how fast you need to do something.

mickyflinn · 4 May 2022 at 11:34

Ddr6 desktop wont be here for a while as ddr5 has only just been released but don't be confused with ddr6 on a gpu. DDR5 offers little performance gains in gaming and usually those gains are at lower resoloution, check out some reviews.

There is always something new around the corner but that doesn't mean what you buy wont last, a lot of people are still rocking on quad core cpu. If your gaming at high resolution like 4k then cpu is less important as the gpu does most of the work.

Me personally if gaming would move to a six core cpu and ddr4, what's your main Use ?

ChocAndGray · 4 May 2022 at 12:19

No chance of DDR6 releasing anytime soon. DDR5 still hasn't even become mainstream.

With regards to using the 5800X3D as a reference for how soon the next best thing releases, that's more of a last goodbye for the socket rather than a proper release.

Same principle as the 3090Ti.

As things stand if you built a pc with fast DDR4 ram and a 5800X3D you'd be set for a good few years, especially at high resolutions.

Haz123 · 4 May 2022 at 12:31

I think you are confusing obsolescence with progress. Your current PC is far from obsolete.

Your 4 core Skylake cpu is certainly not ideal for modern AAA games but it will be able to perform basic windows tasks for the foreseeable future. The requirements for office tasks and web browsing has plateaued and anything that was purchased since Skylake and Ryzen will be perfectly capable of being used for the next 5+ years.

Your gpu is still very very capable of running all current games, it just cannot do so at 4k with over 60fps and all the eyecandy turned on. It does not have raytracing but it is still pretty darn good, I still have a PC with a 1080 in it and that performs ok and your Ti is approx 30% faster than that.

If you bought a 3xxx card when they were first released then you would have had 2 years with it being top of the tree, in PC terms that is quite a long time.

Werewolf · 4 May 2022 at 16:29

Almost anything you buy is going to be "out of date" in that there is always something that is "newer" in development, but if you wait for that "newest thing" to be released it'll then be out of date as something else is in the pipeline...

Companies work 5-10 years in advance on a lot of hardware from the time they first start looking at it, and PC generations tend to be 3-4 years for things like RAM and 2-3 years for videocards.

Ideally imo you upgrade around time the "latest" memory is a few months old and is starting to drop in pricing and put in as much as you can (if need be putting off the GPU upgrade for a few months).
Mind you this opinion is based in part because of the times I've basically been forced to do CPU/Motherboard replacements earlier than I wanted because in the past I've been caught out by the ram starting to go up dramatically in price about 3 years after I've built a machine, so it's worked out more economical for me to do a mobo/cpu/ram upgrade using the "current" memory than try and buy the older memory. My current machine is ~6 years old with the exception of the GPU and some drives, and still plays most new games at a good level (just not the highest settings) and still feels "fast enough" partly because when I built it I maxed out the ram and bought a midrange GFX card, then about 3 years later replaced the GFX card for the then current upper mid range one.

As Haz says, there is a difference between progress (something newer coming out/in development), and obsolescence, any machine bought today using recent parts is likely to be fully usable for most things for ~5 years or more just not as fast/good at doing newer "pretties" as a machine bought say next year, or the year after.

The store guys will probably shoot me for this, but chasing the top end of the PC gaming market is very expensive and never ending

Choose your new build, spec it to do what you want and can afford then ignore the new shinies unless you actually need something they provide.

(at least for a year or two).

Tetras · 4 May 2022 at 19:42

I agree with you that things seem to be moving very fast right now, in the next year or two there are a whole bunch of new releases and AMD are moving to a new platform. If you went with something decent now, like 12700 or 5800X3D (assuming gaming), I really don't think you'll be disappointed about how long it lasts, but if you are prepared to wait, do it.

jordan47354 · 4 May 2022 at 19:56

terley said:
really confused with the PC component market atm..

Most motherboards still only support DDR4, i doubt you can buy a prebuilt that hasn't been customized that supports DDR5 as it is brand new, yet DDR6 has been still heavily teased for the past couple of years..

So most people buying new rigs could be purchasing PC's with 2 generation out of date memory..

Despite the best gaming CPU on the market atm being the AMD Ryzen 7 5800x 3D, only released last month.. with the 6xxx series CPU's rumoured to release very soon...

Never seen new tech releasing so fast.. mixing scarcity of supply with such short obsolescence can't be good for the PC enthusiast market.

After not upgrading for a while, still stuck with an i7 6700k and a gtx 1080ti, its generally daunting and quite frustrating not knowing if its a good idea or not to upgrade..

With PC components there is always the knowledge that your rig will be outdated reasonably quickly, but right now it seems to be worse than ever.

If you feel like your components are currently holding you back then it's a good time to upgrade regardless of what's around the corner.