European here. I’m pretty content with my setup (Ryzen5 3600XT, 16GB RAM, GTX 1060… I play in 1080p) for the games I’m playing at the moment, and I don’t plan on playing many AAAA games in the future. BUT. With the recent tariffs flying around, China denying rare earths, etc etc I fear we might see an increase in hardware prices like we had with covid, so I was thinking on upgrading at least CPU+VGA; more than FOMO let’s say is Fear Of Being Overpriced. What do you think, should I upgrade now that things looks a little more relaxed? Will the whole mess involve only the USA or everyone cause globalization?
If you’re content then don’t purchase anything. Just enjoy what you have and save money.
Buying at the right time is the best way to save money.
Not buying at all saves even more money.
A 3080 was great value if you somehow got one on release in 2020 for $700
A 9070 xt, if you can get one even for $700 will beat the 3090 even in a lot of ray tracing games
The more you buy the more you save - Jensen Huang
Thanks, Steve.
Just make a decision tree of all possibilities:
- You stay with your current build, and we get a replay of the silicon shortage. Are you content?
- You stay with your current build, and prices go back to normal. Are you content?
- You upgrade your build, and we get a replay of the silicon shortage. Are you content?
- You upgrade your build, and prices go back to normal. Are you content?
Some things to think about:
AM4 is technically a “dead” platform. So unless AMD finally decides to release the Ryzen 9 5900X3D, upgrades will cap out at either a 5800X3D for gaming, or a 5950X for productivity.
The GeForce GTX 1060 only has 6GB of VRAM, so it’ll be in 1080p “Low” graphics settings territory soon.
There are some gaming performance differences with 16GB of system RAM vs 32GB of system RAM. But it will matter much more for multitasking and productivity workloads. A dual-rank dual-channel DDR4-3600 CL16 memory config is optimal for non-APU Ryzen.
My personal choice is to upgrade to a GPU with a modern amount of VRAM, at least 12GB (but preferably 16GB).
An Intel ARC “Battlemage” B580 12GB or the ARC “Alchemist” A770 16GB may be the cheapest (note that ARC GPUs currently have 30W-45W idle power draw).
But an AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT, 7700 XT, 7800 XT, 7900 GRE/XT/XTX would also work well (but there is a hardware bug in the AV1 media encoder: AMD ReLive VCN4 1082p bug).
Nvidia is too greedy to offer many reasonable VRAM configurations, there are also tons of gimped versions of most of their popular cards to be wary of. There’s the RTX 3060 12GB (NOT THE 8GB version), RTX 3080 12GB (NOT 10GB version)/RTX 3080 Ti, RTX 3090, RTX 4060 Ti 16GB (NOT 8GB version), RTX 4070 Super, RTX 4070 Ti Super, RTX 4080 Super, and RTX 4090.Useful resources:
TechSpot
Hardware Unboxed (YouTube)
Hardware Canucks (YouTube)
Level1Techs (also on YouTube)
Gamer’s Nexus (also on YouTube)Slap Linux on that bad boi and you’re set. Half joking aside. That’s a nice machine, I have a similar setup and do play a few AAA games. You’re still good for a mid while. Save your money for something special. If you really NEED something, buy a band aid=mini PC, on board GPUs are pretty strong these days.
Will the whole mess involve only the USA or everyone cause globalization?
A couple companies have outright said to make up for lost profits from tariffs they’re increasing prices everywhere else.
So Euro customers will pay more for a Switch 2 because due to tarrifs Americans will buy less.
I haven’t heard AMD or Nvidia say they’ll do it, but everyone is going to do it. If they don’t, stock prices go down.
i dont think amd or nvidia wont do it as explicitly. its already known that at the moment, some locations in the EU are aleady seeing msrp 5070 sitting on shelves because its not a highly desireable product, while they get bought up in the US faster at a higher price because the stock of everything else is non-existent
do it as explicitly
They won’t, Nintendo is one of the few companies who can get away with saying it.
But just because other companies won’t say it, won’t mean they won’t do it.
The alternative is they sell less and make the same profit margin. That means profits don’t just fail to increase by the desired percentage, profits could go down. Profits must never go down, because the global economic system is a house of cards and it could cause a healthy company to make very stupid decisions due to stock price and spiral into bankruptcy.
Stock price is only random people’s opinion at the end of the day, they won’t risk profits going down, everyone will see higher prices to compensate for a reduction in the American market
Nintendo can just say it because you can’t play Zelda or Mario Kart anywhere else than their hardware, in a way they’re a monopoly.
The console manufacturers will raise prices globally to cushion against the US tariffs, because the calculus is that by keeping the costs low for the US - they can make up the difference with game sales over the console’s lifetime.
I think something similar will happen to smart phones and tablets also, because of the trailing revenue.
Hardware like CPUs and GPUs lack that additional revenue stream, so it will depend on if AMD & nVidia determine it’s better to push the tariffs exclusivity onto US consumers, or spread them out globally and dampen the impact.
IMO the AMD 7900 GPU series is in a sweet spot R/N (at least with used listings I can see).
It’s not really in demand for AI, very fast, but not “4090+” fast to shoot the price through the roof. New but not too new. Plenty of VRAM to give it longevity. Going forward they will probably get more scarce and get swept up in tariff prices.
So… Maybe get one of those. Or a 7800.
Others mentions a 5700XD, which I am a huge fan of, except prices for it seem to be sky high, like way more than a 5800.
Id prioritize GPU above all the other parts. That is going to be the single biggest price hike IMO.
Any CPU you can drop in your existing motherboard is likely already in your country and shouldn’t be affected by any tarriffs, AM4 CPUs are no longer being manufactured AFAIK.
DDR4 RAM is fairly cheap at this point, adding another 16GB would be good, more than 32GB total isn’t really gonna improve performance much.
Going to full NVME storage (if you are using a SATA SSD/HDD) is also a pretty big upgrade.
Buy a used 5700x3D, update your BIOS to the last version, remove heatsink, take out 3600 and put in at least 5700x3D or5800x3D, take out the 16GB and put in 32GB, but any recent GPU you can afford to replace 1060. A 4060 beats the 1080 Ti in everything to give you an idea. It’s only a few frames but it beats it. Even for 1080p, if you turn off DLSS, it’s not overkil. If stores sell a $299USD 5060 I would say to buy that, but any 40 series will be a big boost, combined with 3D CPU, you will be loving it all
I agree with you, I just don’t agree with the GPU advice. I would not buy a 4060 at the moment. I don’t know what your budget is, but I would say buy something with at least 12Gb VRAM. Even for 1080p, 8 will be insufficient in the future.
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gpu-hierarchy,4388.html#section-rasterization-gpu-benchmarks-2025 and https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/ can give you some more idea what to buy. I would even go as much as saying buy second hand as the new GPUs all are underperforming and you might score a better deal buying second hand.
Get it in before tariffs start to really kick in. I just did it, I’m pretty sure in 6 months it’s going to be so much more expensive.
Edit: if you’re in the u.s.a.
Tell me you didn’t read past the title without telling me you didn’t read past the title
Glazed by the first sentence, my bad. It wasn’t in the title. If you’re going to be a dick get it right at least.
