Building your dream PC ... the waiting game

Apr 21, 2020
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I'm in a process of building my first PC. When I say building, I will start from scratch and assemble it myself. Been doing hours of research lately and the more I research, the better specs I want but my wallet won't allow.


My question are:

  1. Do you wait and save.. till you can buy all the parts in one go ?
  2. Do you buy parts every pay day? or let say when budget allows? If so, what did you buy first?

I'm leaning towards buying one or two parts per pay day, I don't know but I think it's exciting. How bout you? What's your experience.
 

Barty1884

Retired Moderator
If you need something now, then buy what you can afford with an eye on an upgrade later.

If you can afford to wait, I'd always advocate waiting until you can buy your components together, at least generally. For two main reasons:

1.Being able to verify functionality.
If you buy a component that depends on another new component you don't have (CPU, no motherboard or vice-versa, GPU but no PSU etc)... you don't know it 'works' until you have the rest of your components. At which point you've likely gone past the return window with a retailer, necessitating you to deal with the manufacturer via RMA, which takes substantially longer.

2. Pricing.
If you buy a CPU/MB/RAM, or GPU today.... but can't use it for a few months, what happens if something new launches in the meantime? It either means you can have more performance for the same money, or the 'older' components tend to get a bit of a discount to move old stock. Doesn't always work that way, but that's the general idea.

You can buy components you can use right away - SSD/HDD or GPU that you can drop into your existing system for the short term, Case you could transplant your existing system into.... Or even CPU/MB/RAM if you can reuse your current GPU/PSU/Storage.