With promised tariffs incoming next year a lot of tech enthusiasts in the US have been wondering if we should just be buying new hardware now while we they're not flatly more expensive than they would be after tariffs. This has me considering some things about my current computer.
To start, the specs after a few here-and-there upgrades are:
- CPU: Ryzen 7 5800X 16-core
- Memory: 4dimm x 8Gb DDR4 at 32Mhz - So 32Gb total
- GPU: Nvidia RTX 2070 SUPER
- Motherboard: ASUS PRIME x470-PRO
This computer has been more than enough for the games I run since I built it in 2019 with money I made as a janitor over a summer. It runs most new AAA games fine at medium settings as well, but those I play fewer and fewer of nowadays, and I prefer higher FPS over things like ray tracing. I truly think for my use case I could get another 3 years out of this thing easily. So I have conflicting thoughts about upgrading.
On the one hand, the only upgrade that makes sense is to move up to the am5 platform with DDR5, which entails buying an entirely new mobo, cpu, and memory. Black Friday deals and Micro Center bundles mean I could get a solid - but not top of the line - CPU, mobo, and 32Gb of DDR5 for under $800. I would try to keep my current corsair all-in-one water cooler since it's worked so well for so long anyway, and I would also keep my case since it's just an NZXT H510 that I've sort of sticker bombed and want to keep. I would need to upgrade the power supply as well since new components require more than my puny 550W power supply can muster.
The other obvious upgrade is my graphics card. It would easily be, and even now might be, my one bottleneck. But with the timing of the new 50-series Nvidia cards, the realization I will likely run Linux as a primary operating system for the foreseeable future, and the tariffs meaning newer cards might be once again in the thousands range... I'm thinking tossing this 2070 into the new system until the new card announcement and prices wouldn't be such a bad idea. Maybe the cards are ridiculous and so getting 50-series is totally worth it, or maybe they're a small leap and so getting a higher-end 40-series card might be more viable in terms of price-per-performance. I truly don't know.
What I do know, is that if Trump gets his blanket tariff everything in tech is about to get way more expensive for north american consumers.
A final, and admittedly much smaller, consideration is that because this upgrade isn't strictly necessary I am aware that I'd be feeding into the classic western consumerist tendencies as well as creating e-waste that's all but impossible to avoid ending up in landfill. Though I could curb that by tossing my old components into a cheap ass case and turning into my new home server this time with CUDA acceleration!!!
Maybe someone out there with their finger on the pulse of computer hardware knows better.
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Thoughts? Send me an email!
kagumail.uselessly535@passinbox.com
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