Yeah, my trick is to save up and try to buy the 2nd best components as much as possible. The very best will always have a shiny new thing tax attached to them, but 2nd best is where the real value comes in. Granted I’m not building gaming pcs, so this isn’t too unreasonable. The current market won’t let me get close to what I’d actually like though.
eBay helps too. I picked up 16gb of ddr4 ram for someone the other day for $40 and got myself a cpu cooler for my build for $60 less than brand new. It was just open box so basically new. Takes patience but there are still deals to be found out there.
My ten year old former Win10 gaming PC was recently reborn as a CachyOS Linux gaming PC, and I just finished playing through Clair Obscur on it. I did have to upgrade the video card, but I got the RTX 5050, well within your “second best” range target, since it’s technically their budget level card.
Yeah, my trick is to save up and try to buy the 2nd best components as much as possible. The very best will always have a shiny new thing tax attached to them, but 2nd best is where the real value comes in. Granted I’m not building gaming pcs, so this isn’t too unreasonable. The current market won’t let me get close to what I’d actually like though.
eBay helps too. I picked up 16gb of ddr4 ram for someone the other day for $40 and got myself a cpu cooler for my build for $60 less than brand new. It was just open box so basically new. Takes patience but there are still deals to be found out there.
My ten year old former Win10 gaming PC was recently reborn as a CachyOS Linux gaming PC, and I just finished playing through Clair Obscur on it. I did have to upgrade the video card, but I got the RTX 5050, well within your “second best” range target, since it’s technically their budget level card.