Let me tell you about an emotional roller coaster ride I’ve been on in the past eight months. It’s a cautionary story about the dangers of obsessing over pc hardware, but also about celebrating a triumph against adversity.
In 2015 I bought a brand new pre-built gaming PC – the first time I’ve done this – and had such an amazing experience with it that I swore I would never update it, I would just wait a couple of years and as the time I just bought another one again. In theory it was a good plan, but my timing was up to 2020 path out.
The PC that I bought in February 2015 and that had accompanied me through everything The Witcher 3 through to Death stranding, was to begin by mid-2020 Really show its age as it has not only struggled with newer PC games (horizon especially), but also basic things like Photoshop.
So, five and a half years after my last PC, I bit the bullet and ordered a new one. I was a little nervous, mainly because of the timing of my purchase; Nvidia’s 2000 series cards have been around for a while, and a brand new series of cards, likely offering massive performance gains, was sure to be available soon.
But I play almost all of my work games on and with my PC Cyberpunk and a new one Assassin’s Creed (and many other great Christmas games!) Along the way, I couldn’t afford to wait for a hypothetical new series of cards that may or may not be coming soon. You have to draw a line in the sand somewhere, and the need dictated that that line should be drawn for me in August 2020.
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I won’t bore you with all the details, but in the end I got a system that included an RTX 2080 Super, a card that wasn’t absolutely the best at the time but was still a huge improvement over the 900-series GPU replaced. I had a nice case, I got new pc stuff for the first time in over five years, I was excited!
When it arrived and I could see what a modern gaming PC can do in 4K on a 32-inch monitor, I was so impressed I wrote a blog about rocks. For two weeks I was in heaven, downloading every game I skipped or went through due to poor performance (such as control) and just soak up everything.
Then, just two weeks after my brand new PC arrived, some news hit me like a truck. Nvidia would release the 3000 series cards. I felt a little sick. I’d waited, held on to my fingernails, for over five years if only I’d waitedwhere more weeks I could have stepped into a whole new generation of cards, got better performance, and bought so much more time before I needed the next upgrade.
If this is starting to sound privileged or whining about a stupid thing, this is it! But it also belongs to a lot of people Standard operating instructions for purchasing expensive technology, especially PCs. New and better hardware keeps coming, and so the whole practice of playing on a pc is an emotional balancing act, balancing the money you spend with the performance you get with the window of opportunity until this one Hardware is being replaced and games are getting fancier.
And I totally screwed it up. I spent a lot of money on something that was immediately redeemed. I was an idiot, a fool, a sucker, and as someone pointless and stupidly obsessed with excellence on a pc, I would suffer.
OR I WAS.
After just a few days, my excitement had given way to despair, but only a few weeks later The, Things started to happen. The start of the 3000 series was an absolute disaster, and things have not improved since then. These cards lie between the pandemic and the chronic chip shortage still hard to find, even eight Months later and often when you can think they are ridiculously high Prices as so much of the inventory that makes it onto the shelves is snapped up by resellers.
Even if I’d waited that extra two weeks and decided to upgrade to a 3000-series card, I might not have been able to get one (at least for a reasonable price), and I’m far from being alone in this situation . With the latest cards out of reach for the foreseeable future, many people are opting to upgrade to GPUs that, while a little older, still work and have the added benefit of actually being available for purchase.
Things got so strange that Nvidia did it itself Resumption of production of 2060 and 1050ti cardslong after they were thought to be dead in the water.
With all of this, I’ve come full circle. Eight months later I am satisfied with my purchase again and love my “outdated” 2080, because the 3000 series cannot exist in any way. Of course, all it took was a catastrophic global pandemic, but it’s been a bad year and I want to take my Ws where I can get them.
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