Best Timing for Buying a Gaming PC for Xmas?

senectus on 04/11/2020 - 23:10

My 13 yr old son is a "PC Master race" type (sniff… so proud ;-) ) and its time I upgraded his system.
ATM he has a 4th gen i5 with 8gb ram and a 1060 low profile card in a an old dell optiplex. its getting long in the tooth…

He's a big player of Fallout 4, Destiny 2, Minecraft and is starting to eye off a lot more of the more "grown up" type games.
He's also teaching himself Unity programming and the compile times are taking longer than we'd like…

I'd really like to go something like a i7 with a 2060/2070 and 16gb.. but looking at the price ranges that might be a bit too much for what I'm budgeting.
so a fairly recent gen i5 will probably be good enough i think.

The real question I have is WHEN is the best likely time to commit?
should I expect some really juicy deals closer to xmas? or am I better off grabbing a setup sometime between now and xmas.

Is there an ideal "season" for PC gaming rigs from places like PLE/Storm/Austin etc?

Computing Computer Desktop Computer

Comments

  • Simoneee on 04/11/2020 - 23:13
    +3

    Black friday is coming up soon

  • AustriaBargain on 05/11/2020 - 00:46
    +2

    What about AMD, don't you get more bang for your buck? If your son is like me and likes to leave everyhing open, even stuff that hasn't been touched for months, then he'll want lots of memory and CPU threads or cores. I left a AAA game running in the background for two weeks once without noticing. And at least one SSD. Does your son actually do any design or code compiling learning or anything, video editing, all that stuff cool kids are into these days?

    • Kangal on 05/11/2020 - 01:14
      +1

      The minimum should be B450, r3-3300X, and RX 580-8GB.
      Sizeable upgrade over OptiPlex SFF, i5-4590, and GTX 1050.

      Team Blue-Green (Intel and Nvidia) do tend to have more optimised software/drivers.
      …but you definitely get more bang-for-buck going all in with Team Red. I'd highly recommend it.

      • senectus on 05/11/2020 - 11:15

        These Team red and Team blue green are new to me.. whats that about?

        • Kangal on 05/11/2020 - 12:00
          +1

          In GPU:
          Team Red (AMD) vs Team Green (Nvidia)

          In CPU:
          Team Red (AMD) vs Team Blue (Intel)

          PS: technically Intel is entering the GPU Race with their upcoming Dedicated/Discreet Intel Xe GPUs. There's also the former British ImaginationTechnologies PowerVR GPUs, after a hostile takeover by China, is also entering the dGPU race (they make good stuff, see iPad Pros).

          PPS: technically Nvidia is in the CPU Race, since they purchased the former British ARM holdings. That actually means they're the leader now (Cortex A78-X), far ahead of Zen3, and even further than Intel's SkyLake architecture.

          • senectus on 05/11/2020 - 13:30

            @Kangal: huh, cool ta. very informative.

            I knew about the ARM purchase, but that has no real baring on this purchase :-)

  • Agret on 05/11/2020 - 01:37
    +2

    Skip the i7 and get a B450 motherboard with AMD Ryzen 5 3600 CPU. I'm doing a build for someone with the 3600 & an RTX 3080 for 4K gaming. The 3600 is a great CPU for gamers and very affordable. Don't bother with the 3600X though, not worth the premium.

    • senectus on 05/11/2020 - 11:23

      is there a big difference between the 3500 and the 3600?
      I dont think a 30** gen card is needed here, I'll be very happy with a 20** I think.
      Is the Radeon version of a 20** card fairly comparable? I'm typically an nvidia guy but I'm open to look at the new side of the market.

  • dcep on 05/11/2020 - 01:47
    +2

    just get techfast build for bang buck

    • senectus on 05/11/2020 - 11:19

      Ok thats a site I haven't seen before.

      I was thinking more PLE, but techfast is a quality company for things like warranty etc?

  • DarthAntz on 05/11/2020 - 10:48

    will be plenty of pc's going second hand after the new AMD releases. Might double your performance on a 2nd hand parts build.

    • senectus on 05/11/2020 - 11:11

      buying a 2nd hand machine is buying someone elses problems… if it were for me, i probably would. But not for him.

  • abctoz on 05/11/2020 - 11:24

    typically the closer you get to christmas the less deals…

  • Freezies on 05/11/2020 - 12:22

    Best bet would be the Cyber Monday Sales just after Black Friday at the end of this month.

  • [Deactivated] on 05/11/2020 - 15:24

    Hoping techfast have a new pre-built to take advantage of on black Friday/cyber Monday!

  • Kraise on 05/11/2020 - 17:46
    +1

    Black Friday/Cyber Monday are really great.

    Hopefully Scorptec will do an hourly deal on Cyber Monday again like last year. They had some pretty nice deals.

    I picked up a set of a Ryzen 3600, B450 MSI Pro Carbon and Corsair 16ghz 3200mhz RAM for $560. (Basically the RAM is free).

    They also had deals on gaming chairs, monitors, graphic cards, networking, mouse/keyboards, etc.

    It was all done through their instagram so keep an eye out on that.

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