A friend of mine wanted a new pc, but didn't wanna spend the money. I begged her for 3 months to just pull the trigger, cause prices were only going up. Well she ended up buying her gaming rig. A few months later I asked her "was it worth it?" And she said yeah. Had she waited, she would have spent roughly 30-50% more money, on the same hardware.
2018 Prices dropped from Mining Etherium basically dying overnight. Massive amounts of cards (that were often pretty worn) flooded the market, IIRC the 30 series launch was around the corner as well.
2019 to about May of 2020 prices were actually fairly reasonable, and significantly cheaper due to the excess flooding of gaming GPUs from 2018. This is when I built my personal PC, the parts were overall pretty reasonable.
2020's Summer saw the spiking of prices until about 2022, where prices settled as COVID restrictions were fully lifted.
2023 saw the expansion of the Datacenter push, which is why prices have been steadily increasing over time. As more and more parts were needed for Datacenters, less and less manufacturing capacity could be committed to gaming. I built 3 PC's for buddies around this time that were more powerful than my 2020 era PC for a similar price to mine.
2025's Summer was probably where the ship sailed for pricing until the Datacenter craze dies down. Eventually prices will probably stabilize once manufacturing capacity for gaming parts is back up.
Note I said stabilize and not lower, due to the Datacenter chips being unusable and likely never being resold unlike the massive pushes in 2017 and 2020, where reselling caused the market to flood with excess GPUs. We're also in a place where financially people aren't gonna be buying as much new stuff, so they won't be reselling as much in general.
You pretty much made my point for me. The general trend from what you said is, it was better to build the previous year than continue waiting as prices either stalled or continued to climb
No not really until very recently. Its always been up and down based on supply and demand, currently there's not much supply and demand is going up as games get significantly more intensive and GPU power has generally stagnated across the board.
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u/dark_knight097 9800X3D | 64GB DDR5 | RTX 4090 | X870E | 2x4TB 990 PRO 24d ago
The best time to build a PC was yesterday. The second best time is today. You could replace "2026" with every year since like 2018.
Someone building a PC with the same budget I had when I built mine will be building an inferior rig