Cheers r/belgium,

The last time I was keeping tabs on the prices of PC components was in 2014-15, when I made my current PC. Since then, I pretty much have not given any tought to the advances in this area.

My old PC is starting to give up, it already take some some 15min to boot and every Windows update seems to add 30s to it. Yes, I do keep the bloatware to a minimum, some hardware is struggling nonetheless.

I’m not a particularly handy person when it comes to informatics stuff, so I’d just be looking to buy a pre-made PC or look at the builds suggestion on [Logical Increments](https://www.logicalincrements.com/) or [PC Part Picker](https://pcpartpicker.com/) and have that made at a store like Alternate or Tones.

Have prices improved a bit since the start of the pandemic, or have they been getting worse?

Should I wait until June or so, or there’s no end in sight to the high GPU prices?

I’ve heard that the crypto market is crashing, should I wait and see what happens?

My goals was to spend around 1800-2000€ and have something that will allow me to play games like Cyberpunk in 4K.

8 comments

  3. Long boot time has nothing to do with your gpu/cpu

    Either a hdd or ssd going bad (if you have boot loops AFTER your BIOS loads or get stuck for a while loading windows) or ram going bad (definitely if you have boot loops before you even get to bios)

    SSDs are dirt cheap right now, start by replacing the ssd and your problem will 90 percent likely be fixed and your pc will feel like new.
    Even if the ssd isnt the problem, you’ll need a new ssd for a potential new pc anyhow.

    **One important thing: remove the old hard drive/ssd BEFORE you install windows on the new one.**
    Windows is really dumb and will try to reuse the EFI system partition (a partition on your primary hard drive/ssd that windows uses to know your hardware info) on the old drive, then try to load it from that broken hdd/ssd before trying to boot windows from the new ssd, again causing the same lengthy boot times as it fails to load it over and over.

  4. It’s still a bad time. Getting your PC up to speed again can be really easy and cheap though, just install an SSD and install Windows from scratch. Will set you back 50-70 euro for a decent size and will make any PC pretty fast (unless it’s overheating and/or severely old).

  5. If you can wait, wait. My 10year old PC finally died so i couldn’t report anymore and bit the bullet. I used Megaport and modified one of their “premade” configs to something i liked more, price was ok for the current market and it was decently built.

  6. The recent crypto crash might mean gpu prices finally come down. But these things are generally delayed by a couple of weeks. If theres no window before the summer I highly recommend you wait until the end of the year. Since AMD should be launching their next gen gpu’s and cpu’s then. Which should (in theory) at least mean current hardware will go down in price.
    Intel is also readying up to enter the gpu market, so some extra competition in the market should be good for prices!
    If you absolutely NEED a new system now I would recommend a prebuilt system with standardized components.

  7. Hardware doesn’t slow down with age in 7-8 years, software does and storage can become a bottleneck. I suggest looking into a recent AMD or Intel system but stay away from graphics cards and DDR5 for now as both are still heavily inflated.

    Linus Tech Tips did a video on the difference between old hardware and new, along with the relation to cost.

    The cheapest option to upgrade system performance if you already have an SSD is reinstalling Windows.

  8. A bit of a late reply but …

    Buying a new top end gaming PC at this time costs much more than it should because gpu’s are used for farming crypto currency. The price of gpu’s is based on how efficiently the gpu model can farm, not on what gamers are willing to pay for them.

    So I’ll echo what is others said and recommend that you get an SSD to breathe new life into your current pc. Going from hdd to SSD will be a night and day difference in responsiveness. If you don’t want to do it yourself, any computershop should be able to put an SSD into your pc, copy your old hdd contents to the new SSD, set it as boot and then you’re good to go. Make sure to buy a good brand ssd though, like Samsung.

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