When a computer has been used for a long time, the performance of some games may be a little insufficient. You will definitely want to upgrade some hardware, or you may see some new powerful screens, but the price is not cheap. At this time, many people may consider spending a lot of money to upgrade to the best hardware. After all, it is not a complete rebuild. Just consider the cost of this hardware. But is it really worth it?
For people with unlimited pockets, this is of course no problem, but for people who need to save for a while before changing, or who feel a little heartache after spending money, the well-known hardware foreign media PCWorld believes that it is not worth it at all. They feel that most players should not buy the best hardware for gaming computers, but rather compare which one has the highest CP value.
Foreign media: You don’t need to buy the best hardware for a gaming computer, it’s not worth it at all
PCWorld I think some hardware is too expensive now, which means that even if you spend a lot of money, you may not get better performance. Simply put, you just spend more money.
Take the Intel Core i9-14900K as an example. Nowadays, if many players want to upgrade their CPU, they will definitely consider the latest generation, which is the 14th generation CPU. However, compared with the 13th generation, there is not much difference in architecture between the 14th generation and the 13th generation. They just get a little more performance by increasing the processor clock. Actual measurements show that it is only 2% faster on average, but the price is much higher. On the foreign Newegg website, the i9-14900K compares The i9-13900K is $60 more expensive.
Some people may think this doesn’t seem too expensive? Don’t forget, when you replace the CPU, you also need to replace the motherboard. If every piece of hardware is the latest and greatest, you may spend an extra $250 to $500 in total, but only get a small performance improvement.
Another more obvious example is the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090. The RTX 4090 is currently the most powerful consumer graphics card. Everyone will agree that the performance is really strong and it can handle the highest image quality of all games. People with enough budget will definitely be attracted by this card, but after considering the price, there are actually better options.
Although the performance of the Radeon RX 7900 XTX launched by AMD is worse than that of the RTX 4090, actual measurements show that in 4K games, the RTX 4090 only leads by about 3% to 10%, but the price is very different. The RX 7900 XTX is a full $700 cheaper. This $700 can be used to upgrade more hardware.
PCWorld also shared that when NVIDIA launched the RTX 3090 a few years ago, the MSRP suggested price was US$1,599. At that time, he did not impulse buy it, but waited a little longer. As a result, he bought the RTX 4070 with better performance for US$900 cheaper. The US$900 was used to upgrade the monitor and other hardware, which ultimately improved the performance of his PC.
So, when you are interested in the latest generation of the most powerful hardware and want to upgrade, there are two points you need to think about:
- Is it really much better than the previous generation? Could it be that the previous generation was much cheaper, but its performance didn’t lag too far behind?
- If you wait for the next generation to be released, you will have the opportunity to upgrade your computer with hardware that is cheaper, more powerful or has similar performance, and you may even have more balance to upgrade your computer.
As far as I am concerned, when I buy new hardware, I will first check the complete performance comparison table from abroad, such as that published by Tom’s Hardware CPU、GPU I like the comparison list very much. I can tell at a glance which hardware I am interested in has similar performance. For example, the RTX 7900 XT in the picture below has similar performance to the RTX 4080, but the price is nearly $500 cheaper:
Source: KOCPC Chinese