Thought experiment

Vadersoul

Vadersoul

Vadersoul

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27 Nov 2011
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I have recently, with thanks to some advice in this forum, built my 2nd PC in two years.
The reason being that I wanted to get a new PC for my partner but instead of building her a new one, I decided to give her my one which I built this time last year and build a new one for myself now.

My previous build was an AMD Vega 64 Red Dragon with Ryzen 7 2700
My new build is an AMD 5700 XT regular with Ryzen 7 3700x


The 5700 XT cost me £350
The Ryzen 7 3700X cost me £330
Other component costs £320~
(Around £1000)

The Vega 64 cost me £300
The Ryzen 7 2700 cost me £260
Other component costs £380~
(Around £940)

So overall, I have spent £1,940 in the past two years on PCs.


My question is... what if I didn't build two PCs but just put all of that money into a single build back in October 2018?

  • What would that have looked like?
  • What performance would it get over my current new build, today?

I don't know how best to answer that as I don't have old prices of parts from October 2018 and wouldn't know where to look, so I am wondering if anyone here might know?

If we take the extra that I spent £940, and pool that with the money I spent on CPU/GPU originally, that makes £1,620. Split equally across both GPU/CPU would have been about £810 each (let's call it £800 for simplicity sake).

  • What CPU could I have bought with £800?
  • What GPU could I have bought with £800?
  • If I bench them against my current build, how would they perform today?

The reason I want to know this isn't so much to poke myself for upgrading a year after I spent a good amount of money on a build. I know that I am taking a hit on my wallet for doing that to help my partner upgrade her rig, and I accept that.

I am generally curious how a more enthusiast build would have fared, on a diminishing return basis against a year's worth of performance upgrades and AMD's latest surge on their new chipset/pricing.


The benchmarking I could probably figure out using online tools, but does anyone know how to figure out what CPU/GPUs would have been available at those prices a year ago, please?

EDIT : Just changed one of my conclusions regarding the extra to spend, it didn't change the sum but made it make it read back better
 
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It isn't just the performance of the enthusiast machine that counts though. You also have to factor in the huge savings because you won't be doing a huge every 12 months. Once you have a good cpu/mobo/ram/psu bundle the only thing to upgrade is the gpu. I bought my GTX1080 when the GTX1080ti was released and I'm still on the same system now - i7 7700K, 16gb decent ram, 650w seasonic, 1tb ssd and the GTX1080 driving a 27in Dell Gsync monitor and it still plays everything I need it to at admirable frame rates.

You undoubtedly would have upgraded unnecessarily if you weren't upgrading your partners machine.

As for the answer to your question I'm not sure. I don't keep my finger on the pulse of when tech gets released, maybe someone else will come along with an idea.

Buy right and buy once has always been my motto when spending large chunks of cash on pc equipment - oh and timing really does matter when platform changes appear on the horizon.
 
ExRayTed said:
It isn't just the performance of the enthusiast machine that counts though. You also have to factor in the huge savings because you won't be doing a huge every 12 months. Once you have a good cpu/mobo/ram/psu bundle the only thing to upgrade is the gpu. I bought my GTX1080 when the GTX1080ti was released and I'm still on the same system now - i7 7700K, 16gb decent ram, 650w seasonic, 1tb ssd and the GTX1080 driving a 27in Dell Gsync monitor and it still plays everything I need it to at admirable frame rates.

You undoubtedly would have upgraded unnecessarily if you weren't upgrading your partners machine.

As for the answer to your question I'm not sure. I don't keep my finger on the pulse of when tech gets released, maybe someone else will come along with an idea.

Buy right and buy once has always been my motto when spending large chunks of cash on pc equipment - oh and timing really does matter when platform changes appear on the horizon.
Click to expand...


I understand and as much as I enjoy building PCs, I don't think I will go for another one for about 2 years. From a tick/tock mentality, I reckon that is probably the best window before the next time comes around that AMD improve. I am a big fan of AMD over Intel, always have been.

As I mentioned above, I pretty much know I overspent. I accept that.
The true comparison would have been to see how much buying her a new low-end build would have been and add it into the mix, but not that bothered about that aspect.

The cost isn't as important to me as the idea of answering the overall question. What happens when you take a decent PC build, overspend on it by about £940~ and then wait a year to see how it compares to other things on the market that today.


Moores lore is an interesting beast and I am curious to see if the improvements in the market VS the diminishing returns of pushing a decent build to a bling build underlined by a Moores Law (ish, since we are talking one year instead of two) mentality.... is there the chance that doing this actually isn't as much of an overspend as you think?
 
ExRayTed said:
Buy right and buy once has always been my motto when spending large chunks of cash on pc equipment - oh and timing really does matter when platform changes appear on the horizon.
Click to expand...

I believe that when I bought before, not only did I go skrimp on the CPU/GPU (could have spent more, as I did this time around) but I believe I grabbed them mid way through a chipset cycle. Had I done it a year before, as they got released and we were comparing with a 2 year cycle, it might be a different story.
So, there is the chance that I didn't get the most cutting edge option when I bought last year but buying this year, there is a chance that I did and do those factors even out? That's the one thing I wish I could find out.


Perhaps the way of answering this is finding an AMD price list from a year ago.
Since RRP rarely deviates lower (sometimes higher) than what is sold in the shops, its likely that if I can find a current price sheet for Ryzen / Vega 64 going back to october last year, I could make that guess.

I mean, would I have had enough to get a ThreadRipper? I don't know
 
OK, so i did some research myself... got the idea that I could just get it from AMD price releases myself rather than relying on historical retail history, which I couldn't think how to get (how do you find past sale prices on Amazon or such when that is unlikely to be put on a flyer or anything).

Threadripper 2950x was $899, which leaves me about $120 (£95 from back then) to spend on a GPU and the best I can see that was available with the rest of the budget was the AMD 16 GB Radeon Vega Frontier Edition Professional Graphics Card

As far as I can tell, benchmarks that are available for these parts, don't seem to support the case to have spent more earlier.
the GPU actually performs 25-50% better on a 5700 than the Frontier
the CPU, seems to perform higher but from a gaming point of view it looks like the GPU would have been the bottleneck there anyway, since unless I am using it to perform more CPU intensive workloads, for gaming alone it wouldn't justify its cost when comparing to the Ryzen 7 3700x

So it doesn't look like it would have made sense to buy a single beefy card.
It might have made more sense to crossfire 2 x Radeon Vega 64's, and compare those... but i can't find a decent way to do that benchmark to find out.
 
Why did you change your motherboard and CPU? Whoever gave you that advice needs to stop giving out advice. The GPU upgrade was a good one.
 
My girlfriend had a 4 year old, entry level, computer shop build that was crunching along and running everything (even as basic as WOW) in low settings.
The choice was to either help her upgrade, which would have involved an entire new build for her OR I give her my unit and build myself something new.

Were it a simple upgrade, I would have gladly just got a new CPU since the Ryzen 7 2700 would still have been capable of keeping up with the GPU for awhiles.


This wasn't the most cost effective way for me to get a new PC experience, the alternative (which would have been cost effective) would have been to build her a new case, PSU, mobo. Reuse one of my spare SSDs. Put my Ryzen 7 2700 and RX Vega 64 and old RAM into that.
Then, just upgrade my CPU/GPU and RAM and I would have been set. Would have saved me a couple of hundred quid at most though, I didn't lose as much in just doing it this way around.

And an excuse to build a new PC is always a good one.
And it was my birthday.
And I just had a nice paycheck.

So, why not? :)
 
So you were buying a second PC anyway? If that's the case, this though experiment doesn't really work? Or maybe I am missing something. :)
 
melmac said:
So you were buying a second PC anyway? If that's the case, this though experiment doesn't really work? Or maybe I am missing something. :)
Click to expand...

Well, it does because it made me think "This is a chunk of money to spend, I have a reason to do it and I am happy with that but what if I could go back in time and give myself the extra cash? When I returned back to the present, how good would that PC perform?"
Completely useless and impossible to do anything with other than chat about, but the point was that I had a curiosity about the depreciation of PC parts vs the chipset improvements of the manufacturer vs the value of going mid-high end to enthusiast
 
Generally I think that GPU performance has been quiet flat for a few years but CPU performance (with Ryzen 1,2 & 3) has increased dramatically over the past 2-3 years. Currently I am loving my two 3600's.

I still find my Fury suitable for 1440 or 4k gaming and also have a vega 56 in my other PC. Personally I think that you could have kept an old GPU. Alternatively that even upgrading a AMD cpu every 2-3 that the performance benefits would have been worth it.
 
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