Question Future-proofing a PC build ?

[IDProG]

I was out of the PC building community since early 2022 and have just rejoined it. I can't believe how massive the changes have been.
1. Graphics cards' prices returning to normal
2. PCIe 5.0
3. DDR5
4. 4nm
It's actually crazy.

I planned to buy a PC in 2022, but cancelled it. My current PC has a GTX 1070. I think it will be great to have an upgrade at any time around 2024, but I'm not sure.

People like to "futureproof" their build. However, the problem is that the conventional idea of futureproofing is too shallow. "Buy the most powerful CPU. Buy the most powerful GPU. Buy the most GB of RAM. Buy the best motherboard."

There are problems with this mindset:
1. Some parts are just not capable of being futureproofed or must be futureproofed at the right time. The most obvious example is water cooling. 3 years is the maximum.
Another example is SSD. Let's turn back time to around PCIe 3.0 SSD. Let's say you bought the fastest PCIe 3.0 SSD. Turns out, a year later, PCIe 4.0 SSDs arrived and curbstomped your SSD.
ANOTHER example is CPU. Let's say you buy a 16-core CPU for futureproofing purposes. Turns out, the 16-core CPU that you buy is a dual-chiplet CPU and one gen later, a mono-chiplet 16-core CPU gets introduced, curbstomping yours.
2. Some parts can be overkill.

Sure, your parts are by no means outdated. They can still perform fine. However, each slip definitely makes the system take a hit in the futureproofing aspect, which defeats the whole reason you futureproof the build in the first place.

How do you futureproof your build, if you do?

 

[Lutfij]

How do you futureproof your build, if you do?
I tend to hold onto my system's as long as possible.

The question boils down to your usage scenario if the existing system needs to be uplifted to allow you a boost in productivity. Often times people spend on parts as increment upgrades but land squarely on a horizontal upgrade instead of a vertical upgrade, for lack of a better term.

If it's OCD that drives a person to eek out the most off of the existing platform, then that's another factor to consider.

My 2 cents on the matter.

 

[SyCoREAPER]

For me timing worked out. I futureproofed in the regard that it was the best available at the time knowing it was a dead socket and DDR4 was being replaced.

This got me everything comparatively cheap except the GPU.

So double edged sword, I got some of the best that was available at EOL for the socket and RAM revision for cheap but can't upgrade without replacing most everything.

 

[Why_Me]

After 4 - 5 years get a new board, cpu, gpu and RAM. As far as drives go ... I started out with a mechanical drive when there were no SSD's so anything past that is fast for me.

 

[MJS WARLORD]

As long as your pc does what you want it to is it really necessary to replace it.
This is my 6 year old custom built pc , i was about to click build and my pc gamer magazine dropped through the door and showed the just available gtx 1080 so i had that instead of the titan.

The tower COOLERMASTER HAF-X FULL TOWER GAMING CASE

The cpu is Intel® Core™i7 Six Core Processor i7-6800K (3.4GHz) 15MB Cache. The motherboard is ASUS® ROG STRIX X99: ATX, USB 3.1, SATA 6 GB/s.

The ram is 16GB HyperX FURY DDR4 2133MHz (4 x 4GB)
The graphics card is 8GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1080 - DVI, HDMI, 3x DP - GTX VR Ready! .

The main drive is 480GB HyperX SAVAGE 2.5" SSD, SATA 6 Gb/s (upto 560MB/sR | 530MB/sW) for windows and all the items you cant chose where they install .
The second drive is 960GB HyperX SAVAGE 2.5" SSD, SATA 6 Gb/s (upto 560MB/sR | 530MB/sW) for my steam client games and all other games.

The dvd/blue ray is 24x DUAL LAYER DVD WRITER ±R/±RW/RAM. joke ....... think i only used it a couple of times , i use flash drives for back ups of different things.

The cpu cooler is Noctua NH-D15S Ultra Quiet Performance CPU Cooler , this is huge !

The power supply is CORSAIR 650W CS SERIES™ MODULAR 80 PLUS® GOLD, ULTRA QUIET.

Fans .... front and side intake , 2 rear to dump warm air , 2 on gpu and 2 on the noctua , it is so quiet that if it did not have a few led's you would not know it was on .

My rig probably would benefit from a few changes but when i read some gamers with better systems are struggling to run a certain game but i dont have a problem with it , it says to me .... if it aint broke dont fix it.

 

[Tac 25]

these days when money is so hard to earn. As long as I can keep up playing with friends online, then I won't upgrade. To avoid falling into the trap of always going after the newest shiny.

games I play often are Genshin Impact and Granblue Fantasy. Even a 1050ti handles these just fine.

 

[ohio_buckeye]

Don’t always worry any future proofing. You can usually buy outgoing stuff dirt cheap. Newest stuff will cost you a bit more.

Take myself for example. I’m in the boat where I was going to hold onto my am4 system and had a mishap with my water cooler that fried my motherboard. However I’m not ready to upgrade everything yet. So what am I doing?

My local microcenter shows as having this combo for 129. 143 with tax.

AMD Ryzen 5 3600 with Wraith Stealth Cooler, Gigabyte B450M DS3H WiFi, CPU / Motherboard Combo - Micro Center

Get it now! Find over 30,000 products at your local Micro Center, including the AMD Ryzen 5 3600 with Wraith Stealth Cooler, Gigabyte B450M DS3H WiFi, CPU / Motherboard Combo

www.microcenter.com

So a budget b450 board and ryzen 5 3600 for that price. However I’ve got a 5700g that was in my board at the time of the mishap(accidentally cut a power cable that ran from cpu fan header to the pump and tried to power up the pc without knowing, board never worked again)

So I’m hoping my ram, cpu and gpu are alive. If that is the case, I intend to sell the ryzen 5 3600 for about 100 bucks on eBay or use it long enough to update the bios. I do have a 5800x I was going to sell as well, so even if my 5700g is dead then at my worst case I install the 5800x. Yes I know it’s slightly faster than the 5700g.

However my intention is

Use the budget board alone with a 5700g, 32gb 3200mhz ddr4 I had, my red devil 6700xt and existing storage and Corsair rmx 850 watt power supply.

If all of that stuff is working, then I plan to just get this running. In a year or so maybe when ryzen 8000 series arrives or Intel 14th generation, purchase a small micro case that can fit the micro atx board, then fit the 5700g, ram and spare parts into the new case for a home office pc to replace my wife’s aging Dell pc that she uses now. The 5700g will be a humongous upgrade from her i7 3770 and with integrated gpu I won’t need an add in card like she’s using now. So I’m trying to get up and running cheap to upgrade later.

However if I had more money to play with, I could get a bundle for a 7700x, ram and board for 500. But I don’t have that much to spend at the moment. So repairing my old PC is the route.

Anyway look around. They also had a bundle with a board and a 5600x for 200 I think which is still a potent chino today, I think there was another with a z690 board and i5 12600k foot 299. So definitely stuff out there.

 

[IDProG]

How do you futureproof your build, if you do?
I tend to hold onto my system's as long as possible.

The question boils down to your usage scenario if the existing system needs to be uplifted to allow you a boost in productivity. Often times people spend on parts as increment upgrades but land squarely on a horizontal upgrade instead of a vertical upgrade, for lack of a better term.

If it's OCD that drives a person to eek out the most off of the existing platform, then that's another factor to consider.

My 2 cents on the matter.

Thank you for your and others' opinions.

It's not necessarily OCD. I think it's more like "trauma" to me.

I built my first PC ever in 2017. At that time, 4 cores was considered good enough, Intel was still the champion, and Ryzen 1st gen just came out to fight Intel's offerings, forcing them to increase the core count, but it was just the beginning.

It was my stupidity, yes, but I bought Ryzen 1500X instead of something like 1600X because people at that time thought 4 cores was still good enough.

It turns out, 4 cores got outdated in no more than 2 years, maybe even in just a year. It bottlenecks even a 1070 for some 1080p games.

This desire of mine to futureproof the build came from that experience. I always hold on to my system as long as possible. I still play games using my current PC until now.

I think I just want to pick the right parts at the right time, so it doesn't feel like a slap in the face when just a gen later, a vastly more advanced tech than what you just bought comes at a similar price point.

 

[Deleted member 2838871]

How do you futureproof your build, if you do?

There's always going to be something better around the corner is how I look at it. I try to make smart upgrade decisions and leave it at that.

My 2017 build (i7 7700k, 1080 Ti) lasted me till Jan 2021. There was no point in upgrading components at that time so I built a completely new rig (10900k, 3090)...

April 2023 I decided it was time to upgrade to the 4090 for my 4K Ultra gaming... so I did... and went with the 11900k as a PCIE 3.0 to 4.0 upgrade although I probably could have gotten by without it. The net cost after selling the old CPU was minimal... and selling the 3090 obviously helped too.

Everything else in my build is as it was in January 2021. Z490 chipset... PCIE 3.0 Samsung SSDs... DDR4 ram... etc... I don't see a need to upgrade those. The PC is still blazing fast... benchmarks in the top 1% at 3Dmark and it's not worth it to go with an entirely new mobo, CPU, ram and SSDs for minimal improvement that I won't notice.

The 4090 upgrade gives me 3-5 more years out of this build and that's what I plan to do. I'm future proofed because there isn't a single game out there that I won't be able to run reliably for the next few years.

 

[hotaru.hino]

How do you futureproof your build, if you do?

I don't try to future proof anything, because what does that even mean? Standards and features change all the time, so there's really no point in trying to build a machine that you hope to predict the future with. Instead, I set some reasonable expectations for what I want my hardware to do (such as play games at 1080p, 60FPS, on the high quality preset) and build something that comfortable exceeds those expectations.

In addition, I also try to understand what each part in the system does to a decent enough degree. For example, I know that PCIe version doesn't really matter anymore. I don't care if my computer can't support PCIe 5, because we've yet to see a case where PCIe 3.0 x16 is a bottleneck, and it's been this way for a while (though I still keep up with TechPowerUp's articles on it).

I also understand more cores doesn't really mean much for gaming on the simple observation that even my 6C/12T processor doesn't approach anywhere near 80% on a given game.

By understanding the practical and appreciable aspects of the system, you can stop worrying about chasing the latest technology when whatever you have now will likely work fine for years to come.

 

[Deleted member 2838871]

By understanding the practical and appreciable aspects of the system, you can stop worrying about chasing the latest technology when whatever you have now will likely work fine for years to come.

Agree 100%.

I remember back in the 1990's when a Pentium PC would be outdated by the time you got it home from the store...

That isn't the case anymore. Now PCs can last for years.