Are there standard/common times during the year where solid pc part sales are to be expected?
I am in the market for a graphics card at the moment, but not sure if I should be pulling the trigger with what is available now, or waiting.
Time of Year and Buying PC Parts - What Should I Know?
Lwickybar on 09/06/2024 - 13:46
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This, wholesalers don't care about holidays, it's about supply/demand. Places like techfast will already do bulk orders of particular components that are cheaper rather than stock a range of parts in order to get the best prices (but with little variability in options) and run on lower margin due to high sales, places with a range of components will sometimes clear slow moving stock at next to no margin, these are the best options usually.
Still blows my mind that a GPU I paid $1k for 4 years ago still sells for $500-600 used.
nVidia's 5000 series isn't exactly looking mind blowing, things like Displayport 2.1 and proper PCI-e 5.0 utilisation are cool but it'll be another 15-20% bump in speed and the usual shenanigans with pricing and tiers. AMD/Intel simply aren't competing enough to exert any pressure on them.
Nvidia is worth more than Apple today. And it's not from prioritising consumer graphics cards. If you need a card you should buy it because no one knows what is going to happen with prices or availability of chips.
Not for parts, no. It's a very competitive sector and things become outdated very quickly so you just need to be on static-ice/amazon/ebay regularly and snipe when you see a price that you consider decent.
For graphics cards you might see price variations of up to $80-120 or so, but this will vary over a monthly cycle, not in response to EOFY, or Cyber Monday, or Boxing Day.
Obviously though, the longer you wait the "better" a deal you're going to see because there's always new product ending up on the market, and manufacturers are repositioning their cards based on lower than expected sales, new competition and the like.