Prices

[chiller15]

So I've just bought a refurbished 1080 Ti for a decent price and now thinking about upgrading the rest of my system. I'm currently running an i7-2600K with 16GB RAM that I purchased back in 2011. It's served me well over the years, but now it's starting to throttle in new games. I'm now looking at an i7-9700K and 16GB RAM, which should set me up nicely. The CPU, RAM, motherboard, M.2 drive and CPU cooler are going to set me back around £800.

 

So I'm wondering what the norm is for prices to drop to more affordable levels after release. Obviously the i7-9700K and Z390 boards are fairly new and at high price points. Am I worth waiting till say, the Christmas sales or after the New Year to see where prices are at? Or am I unlikely to see a meaningful drop in prices?

 

What has the trend been for previous new releases of CPU/boards?

[samcool55]

Heh, they won't.

The reason it's so expensive is because there's a shortage of them. There are just not enough CPU's to meet demand.

So, demand stays high, supply gets lower and lower, prices go up, simple as that.

 

Some say it will last until at least march next year. So most people don't care about intel anymore and just go AMD because the performance hit is very small compared to the price difference.

 

Prices of AMD cpu's are actually going down instead of up because they can easily meet the demand for them and they are quite good. So you have 3 options.

 

1. wait until prices drop, will take a few months

2. buy now when we know it's overpriced

3. go AMD and take the small performance hit but save yourself a nice amount of cash.

[chiller15]

1 hour ago, samcool55 said:

Heh, they won't.

The reason it's so expensive is because there's a shortage of them. There are just not enough CPU's to meet demand.

So, demand stays high, supply gets lower and lower, prices go up, simple as that.

 

Some say it will last until at least march next year. So most people don't care about intel anymore and just go AMD because the performance hit is very small compared to the price difference.

 

Prices of AMD cpu's are actually going down instead of up because they can easily meet the demand for them and they are quite good. So you have 3 options.

 

1. wait until prices drop, will take a few months

2. buy now when we know it's overpriced

3. go AMD and take the small performance hit but save yourself a nice amount of cash.

I decided to take the plunge and ordered the i7-9700K!

 

I've read about the soldered IHS heatspreader - but unclear as to what that actually means. It seems to be referenced around delidding, or the need not to in this case. So I'm presuming I still require the thermal compound between the CPU and cooler? (I know it's a dumb question, especially given my own experience as a techy for the last 10 years, but I want to be doubly sure on such expensive hardware!)

[samcool55]

27 minutes ago, chiller15 said:

I decided to take the plunge and ordered the i7-9700K!

 

I've read about the soldered IHS heatspreader - but unclear as to what that actually means. It seems to be referenced around delidding, or the need not to in this case. So I'm presuming I still require the thermal compound between the CPU and cooler? (I know it's a dumb question, especially given my own experience as a techy for the last 10 years, but I want to be doubly sure on such expensive hardware!)

You have 2 things.

The CPU die itself, basically a bunch of silicon massaged into a CPU. And the IHS, the metal plate-thingy you see and that covers the CPU die.

These 2 needs to be connected because the heat from the CPU die needs to get to the IHS. Back in the day it was soldered together, which means excellent heat transfer from the die to the IHS.

 

Intel switched from that (solder) to thermal paste which was cheaper, but had a lot of issues. One of them was that heat transfer between the die and the IHS was awful, it could make a 10°C difference easily.

 

So what people did was delid their cpu (taking the IHS off the die) and changing the thermal paste with liquid metal. It makes the heat transfer better, but ruined your warranty and was risky to do. But hey it made a big difference temp wise and allowed higher overclocks.

 

But with the latest generation, intel went back to solder because, well it runs so hot they basically had to. If they didn't switch it would throttle almost always and something like a noctua NH-U14 or 240mm aio would be the minimum you would need to keep it cool, at stock.

[SpiralTTGL]

basically it makes the cpu heat transfer more effective to the IHS(internal heat spreader the little metal square ontop of the cpu itself) and that allows the heatsink to remove that heat more effectively lowering cpu temps and allow's higher OC