If You’re About to Build a PC…
September 14th, 2020I don’t do much PC hardware commentary, but if there was ever a time for it, this is it.
If you follow computer news at all, you know that we’re in for an interesting couple of months. (Never mind the upcoming U.S. Presidential election disaster. *pfft*)
Nvidia’s RTX 3000 series cards have been announced and RTX 3080 (Founders Edition) reviews come out on September 16 at 6 a.m. Pacific Time.
Many enthusiasts understood that Turing was a ripoff and stayed away.
Now that Nvidia is (apparently) back on track with Ampere, there is a lot of built up demand and interest. Crypto miners will also be buying Ampere cards.
Then, in October, AMD will launch their Zen 3 desktop CPUs and RDNA2 based graphics cards.
AMD’s domination of the enthusiast CPU market is almost certainly going to expand with Zen 3. There are also tantalizing rumors that RDNA2 could be more interesting than most are expecting.
I would definitely hold off on building anything at least until the Zen 3 announcement on October 8. If current gen Ryzen is good enough for your needs, look to pick those chips up at even deeper discounts after the Zen 3 announcement. I would also hold off on buying any of the RTX 3000 series cards in case AMD has anything truly interesting to say with regard to RDNA2/”Big Navi” on October 28.
One more thing about Nvidia and Ampere: Many rumor sites (one example) are saying that Nvidia has several more SKUs ready to launch next year. The initial RTX 3090, RTX 3080 and RTX 3070 are just the start of Ampere.
All of that said, once you do decide to build, please consider making your hardware purchases via one of my Amazon affiliate links. Thank you!
