Great series, Techspot - thanks!
As others have mentioned, you can hold off forever to wait for the "perfect" time to build. But with the artificial high prices due to crypto-mining and potential new generation releases; in the 20+ years I've been building computers, I don't recall a more obvious "DO NOT BUILD" time-period than right now.
+1
In 25+ years I cannot recall seeing it this bad. I used to pay more by % for things than I do now and it was ok; but with the cheap prices of the last few years we have gotten spoiled.
Example: I usually upgrade/build around the 3 year mark and my builds used to cost $1500-$1800 and then they were just $1500 and my last upgrade which was pretty much a build except for the case was $1100 or so and that got me a decent gaming machine that would do whatever else I needed.
I also remember paying $300 for a 6 GB harddrive when they were new and what would $300 get you for storage right now? So prices went down on practically everything in the PC building world for a lot of years and I for one got pretty spoiled.
I don't really see an end in sight to these high prices on memory and graphics cards for any time in the foreseeable future. I am tempted to just bite the bullet and go ahead as I planned to rebuild about Novemberish. My system is still running OK, but when I see how fast my daughters new system (I built 7 months ago) encodes video and framerate on games, that green monster raises it's head and I have to try to keep it in check. I don't really NEED to rebuild but this is the longest I have used the same main computer since 1991
Just for another example of how we used to pay more, I remember building a system for a co-worker years ago built on the Pentium Pro processor(anyone else remember this no upgrade path processor) and she wanted me to spare no expense. With printer and all her system costs about $3000+ and while it was top of the line at that time it was nothing special. $3000 gets you a boutique computer nowadays. Prices have really been way down the last few years and that was a good thing!