Worth Starting Now?

[IRISHIwazDrunK]

I am still "wet behind the ears" as it were in PC building and gaming in general. For the better part of 2 months I have been researching and designing builds that could do what I want for a reasonable price (700-900 USD). Thanks to this aptly dubbed GPU Apocalypse I saw my builds almost double in price overnight. 

 

So I throw this question out to you more seasoned PC builders out there:

 

Is it worth starting a PC build right now, or should plans be put on hold until the GPU (and honestly RAM) market becomes logical again?

 

Thanks

[Thony]

In your case (budget) the nvidia GPUs (1050ti and 1060) have pricing just fine. On AMD side its alll fucked. 

 

You could get ryzen CPU and Nvidia GPU right now just fine. RAM pricing is not going to get any better anytime soon. 

[SilkyDistress]

5 minutes ago, Thony said:

-snip-

NVIDIA is pretty fucked. 1050 Ti became mining card also. I don't even have to speak for AMD. Memory prices are way too high from what I remember when DDR3 was mainstream.

16 minutes ago, IRISHIwazDrunK said:

-snip-

Hold off from buying gaming PC cause memory and GPU prices are way too high.

[Guest]

7 minutes ago, Thony said:

In your case (budget) the nvidia GPUs (1050ti and 1060) have pricing just fine. On AMD side its alll fucked. 

 

You could get ryzen CPU and Nvidia GPU right now just fine. RAM pricing is not going to get any better anytime soon. 

The rx 560 and 460 pricing should be normal, because especially on the 2gb models you can't mine.

[Nocte]

45 minutes ago, Thony said:

In your case (budget) the nvidia GPUs (1050ti and 1060) have pricing just fine. On AMD side its alll fucked. 

 

You could get ryzen CPU and Nvidia GPU right now just fine. RAM pricing is not going to get any better anytime soon. 

What?

1050Ti are priced at 1060 levels, and 1060s at almost 1070 levels. 

 

If you call this "fine"...

[Nocte]

37 minutes ago, Almostbauws said:

The rx 560 and 460 pricing should be normal, because especially on the 2gb models you can't mine.

Should be, but it isn't. They cost more like a 470/570s...

Regardless of this, those cards are not optimal for gaming.

[KarathKasun]

@IRISHIwazDrunK

 

Sadly, if you are in the market for a 500-800 USD build, laptops perform better for the money spent right now.

 

If you are persistent, you can snag a 7th gen i5 laptop with SSD, 8gb of ram, GTX 1050 Ti, and a decent 1080p IPS display for around 700.  I think going to an i7 with 16gb of ram pushes the price up to ~900.

 

I picked up a Lenovo Legion Y520 (i5-7300HQ, 8gb ram, GTX 1050 Ti, 256gb SSD, open 2.5" HDD bay) for 699 USD on Amazon back in october.  The 1050 Ti overclocks to ~1900 core and performs a bit better than a GTX 960 4gb or R9 380 4gb (used both in desktop builds for friends/family).  The fans can be forced to max for gaming, and are not too loud or annoying, and I have not seen any thermal throttling in gaming (Deus Ex: Mankid Divided, ARK, PUBG).

 

Gaming performance is right about even with the R5 1400/R9 380 rig I had built early in 2017 for around the same price including the monitor (using the street price of the GPU before the coinpocalypse, which doubled the GPU value making the desktop more expensive than the laptop)

 

Currently, this is around the same price/specs on amazon...

https://www.amazon.com/Acer-Gaming-i5-7300HQ-GeForce-AN515-51-55WL/dp/B074Q54GSR/ref=sr_1_4?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1516391439&sr=1-4&keywords=lenovo+legion+y520&refinements=p_n_feature_five_browse-bin%3A7817224011

 

The Dell Inspiron 15 7000 is also a good choice.