Critical Advice

RElapse · August 13, 2015

Hello All,

Long time lurker (videos and forum) first time poster, Mainly out of embarrassment, I suppose.

Ok here it goes!!

Many Many years ago I was in the thick of building gaming rigs. I want to stress the point of how long ago this was, the graphics card that I had ( and made my friends green with envy) was an S3 Savage 3D (circa 1998). I could never afford the best stuff, and in fact I specifically remember selling almost everything I owned at the time to get said graphics card.

Fast forward a few years,

I, Like many of you began to love gaming and gaming tech and the communities around it, but still could not afford anything of note. Then I had a great idea......Ill join the military, make shit tonnes of money and i can get the gaming rig of my dreams and I have all the time to play I could ever imaging........So in 2002,I did!

The thing that nobody ever tells you, is that you will be deployed......ALOT!! long story shortened, I am now retired from the military. I have a successful military career under my belt, but for 13 years I have dreamed of building my dream rig. Now is the part where your expecting me to say, " and i did " ....sorry.

My VAC Pension is just not enough to be able to do that. I can afford about 20$ a month to save up for parts, I think Ive been smart so far, Ive been able to buy a coupe things that won't be obsolete in a week, (ducky shine 3, razor mamba ( just dies:() and a 500GB SSD)

I love linus and the guys/community, I watch and learn new techniques/ideas/trends, I even had planned to ask if i could meet up with him just because I am a silly fanboy (yes even at 33 y/o) but fate took me away from my beloved west coast Canada (Victoria) and sent me to Ontario

now for the question: given how quickly components improve, and given my extremely limited budget ( basically one component a year) what should be my next purchase, if any? am I fighting a losing battle? I know i will never have a high end gaming PC, but should I even consider building a medium/low end rig?

Thanks for your time.

Aytex · August 13, 2015

budget?

RElapse · August 13, 2015

I have to save up for each part, so about 240$-300 per year.

i.e. 2015 =mother board

2016= cpu

ect

Techicolors · August 13, 2015

you should probably choose a motherboard that has a good upgrade path. that means going with intel for this one. i would look at skylake and haswell CPUs if you're gonna game. might even get away with sandy bridge/ivy bridge

Bensemus · August 13, 2015

cpus, ram and mobos age the slowest so start with those. For gaming rigs the gpu is almost always the bottleneck so keeping that as new as possible is ideal.

August 13, 2015

If you need to get an initial build, I would make a savings account and put your money in it until you can get the barebones core components.

That being said, if you are upgrading I can share my upgrade path with you because I also don't normally have the ability to fork out large amounts of cash at a time.

1) Bought a prebuilt computer with a decent cpu on credit (don't really recommend this, it's usually a waste of money, but it got me a computer)

2) Upgraded my PSU and GPU ($80 for my EVGAB 600, $200 for my GTX 760)

3) Bought a new case for $70 (Corsair 300R) and $150ish for my 250 GB SSD. (Started using my previous HDD as a storage drive)

4) Bought a motherboard and cpu and cooler (Z97E and i5 4690k) for $500ish. This was the most painful upgrade because it was expensive and didn't gain me much gaming performance. But I have programs that I want a high clock speed for and the motherboard in my prebuild computer was so out dated it had to be done. I could keep using my old 8 GB of DDR3 RAM.

I was able to make these upgrades over the course of about 3 years and I still have a very relavent mid-range gaming computer. The thing is, my next upgrade will be back to the GPU again and will probably be next year. That's the thing with computers, the amount that you have to spend every year is plenty to get yourself a fairly high end PC, but don't expect to ever stop paying that annual amount if you want your computer to stay high end.

Hope this helps some.