I’m surprised that so many (40%) have plans to build a new PC in next two years. Especially because we are talking about PC Gamers, who are already PC Gamers. I would assume that most either do not, or upgrade instead build a new PC. From those 40% of 1.5k tomshardware readers who participated in the survey, I wonder in what state their PC are and if they HAVE to build a new PC or they just have a lot of money around and can afford it. Do they sell the old system or parts of it? Unfortunately these are unanswered at the moment.
I finally got round to a significant upgrade to my PC last week. I’ve been running the same PC for 10 years, and it’s really been dying. Fans and HDDs were failing, and it couldn’t play new games at all.
I haven’t replaced my GPU (still on a GTX 980ti) but I jumped to some decent DDR4 RAM, a better CPU, and moved into an SFF case, but I have no confidence any prices are set to stabilise, so I just gave in and built what I could.
I don’t believe in “just upgrading” at this point. If you built your PC with efficiency in mind, there’s like nothing you can even “upgrade”. Anything I can think of will get outdated by the time you need the next thing. A new GPU? Oh, you are still on Gen3… that means a new motherboard. Updating from AM4 to AM…4? Nah that feels like bad value, but AM5 requires DDR5, both of which have already been out for almost 5 years and will likely get replaced in a year or 2. Upgrading RAM? Again, just bumping DDR4 for a marginally better/larger cap DDR4 feels like bad value and unwarranted. Storage? Whoops, your old motherboard doesn’t support NVMe booting and it’s BIOS hasn’t been touched in over 5 years! You are lucky if you even have an M.2 slot.
And believe it or not, these prices are not even the worst they’ve ever been, so might as well just get a new PC every 5 or so years, maybe keep your old storage, CPU cooler, PSU and case, but that’s about it.
I recently built new to pass my current rig to my kid who is only interested in Roblox and other smaller games. And I mean the entire rig, including the desk.
Don’t forget this market insanity started around COVID, and has basically been succeeded by consequent crises with few dips.
The typical release cadence of PC components is around 4-6 years, which requires new motherboard, CPU, and RAM.
Adding in the GPU basically results in a new build, and that’s being generous assuming no upgrades/changes to other parts like PSU and storage.
My take is that a lot of these people wishing to upgrade are those who have simply been holding out since 2020 or earlier. This seems to vaguely match up with the Steam Hardware results, with a fair number of people still using RTX 3000 series or RX 6000 series, of which even the top end cards are starting to become par/outperformed by their modern mid level counterparts.
The typical release cadence of PC components is around 4-6 years, which requires new motherboard, CPU, and RAM.
Not with AMD though. Usually the motherboard can be reused if you buy new generation of CPU and RAM (good luck if you have Intel, then you are screwed and need to change everything). But besides that, even after a few years upgrading graphics card and RAM is all you need to stay “competitive” to play top games. Maybe new SSD too. I don’t know how usual it is to upgrade parts along the way, not all at once. Especially in times like these just upgrading certain parts at a time is the only option for most.
In online communities at least, people seem to be keen to stay on the cutting edge and always have the best and shiniest. Toms Hardware is going to attract this very audience.
I accept that I’m probably too far the other way on the spectrum of patient gamers…but people don’t seem to think of the utility of the item and rather stay obsessed with “10% performance gains”. For the vast majority of people, phones, laptops and computers can easily last over 5 years (sometimes 10 years depending on use case).
Although these frequent upgraders do give a good stock of items for people like me to pick up and stay in the sweetspot of positioning behind the frontline of cutting edge products on the secondhand market.
It’s way easier to get rid of an entire computer second hand than it is bespoke parts that you’ve replaced, so this is what I do too. I used to be on a 4-year cadence with new PCs, but then I kept getting more and more mileage out of my machines, since graphics don’t leap forward so quickly like they used to. My current machine is 5 years old and still runs the latest games on high settings.
Well… I did upgrade mine progressively, I don’t think it still has any original parts, maybe some sata cables? I was able to get a smaller pc offspring out of this, ended up as my nephew’s gaming rig, does it count as my old rig? are both the same rig? damn computer of theseus causing philosophical problems!
I just upgrade one or two parts every 2-4 years. seems to have worked fine for over a decade. dreading when I need to do a mobo update which will include ram
I replaced my old PC only because I went from an i5 6600 to a ryzen 7800x3d and thus needed to replace the RAM as well.
Combone that with an old 4GB 960 and an older 2TB HDD and wanting another case the math was quite easy.
It’s alao a quesrion how you interpret that? At what point is it a new PC vs upgrading? If you have replaced all parts from the original starting build?
Might explain the higher percentage
I would imagine that 40% is saying that hoping for a best case scenario to occur. Prices haven’t even plateaued yet, they are still rising, so at some point regardless their enthusiasm they will be priced out of the market.
The thought that hardware prices will drop to normal levels in the next few years is just wishful thinking.
The question is kind of weird. I want to build a new gaming computer, but that is nothing I’m doing at current prices and I can totally live without building a new one. If that one breaks, I might reconsider. But I really do not know if there are people around who are planning to build a new computer in May 2028.
It can be people budding into the genre. They’ve heard about how nice Steam is, and maybe play some games on a cheap laptop, but recognize a genuine desktop is the better experience.
One streamer I follow is in that situation. She streams off her PS5 and Switch, but has a donation incentive to help build her PC.
Not really, as the article is about PC Gamers who already have a PC. Otherwise they are not PC Gamers who want to build their next PC. I don’t think this survey is meant for newcomers, as far as I understand.
I might fall in that category, depending on how they’d ask me. I have a solid PC I built after crypto stopped inflating the prices but just before the RAM shortage and I’m mostly good, but I’ve got the money and have been thinking I could upgrade soon as a treat. Not at these prices though.
So it all depends if the situation improves in the next two years somewhat. This year? No chance, IMO. next year? Maybe. Maybe I’m too optimistic. But I definitely wouldn’t rule out be building a new PC in that timeframe.
i built a monster pc in 2024 and maxed out the RAM and CPU the motherboard could handle. New 4k monitor and a 32gb RTX video card. I think I spent about $1.5k
no way could I get that stuff for the same price. I could probably sell the parts for more
it’s still a monster and in Linux, I can tweak it just a bit more to get everything it can give.
I’m thinking that the way games have progressed in the last 5 years, there’s nothing on the horizon that says prepare for the new technology that will blow my mind
There… is only a single, mainline, broadly available RTX GPU with 32gb VRAM.
It’s the 5090 RTX.
Which came out in January of 2025.
At an MSRP of $2,000.
With many partner models considerably exceeding that, up to as high as $5,000.
Not only is the pricing ludicrous, the timing is not possible.
The only thing in 2024 or prior I can find with 32 gb vram is basically an unofficial mod or variant called the RTX 4090 D, that never left China, or, maybe it would be something like about as hard to find as a GRE variant AMD card in the US.
I guess unless this person’s uncle works at Nintendo Nvidia, or something.
Outside of that, we’re talking workstation/server type GPUs, generally with even more ludicrous pricing.
This person is either very confused or very bad at lying.
Also wtf does ‘maxed out the system ram’ even mean?
You can get 128gb of sys ram into… most middle to higher tier mobos with 4 dimm slots. Many higher tier pc mobos can do 256gb.
With the specs they’ve claimed and that price, they either got much of it for free or are… yeah, straight-up lying. That price will get the case, mobo, CPU, RAM, PSU, and storage, probably. Maybe not even that much, if it’s all high-end stuff, before prices inflated. GPU and high-end monitor? Nah.
I can currently just barely figure out how to do a 9070 (non XT), 24gb DDR5, 1TB SSD via an AOOStar Gem 12 (soldered on 8745hs, iirc) total setup for the rig, at just a bit above $1500 before tax.
Without a monitor, of course.
That’s like the absolute most bang i can figure how to squeeze out of the least bucks, and its a non tradtional setup that works via a dock/cradle and Oculink (cost of that is included).
Doing the same specs in a traditional PC just ends up being more expensive, though its debatable as to whether the approximately 10% to 15% max performance hit on the GPU that OcuLink incurs in highly demanding scenarios makes that 100% true.
So yeah, this… this person is like, hilariously out of the realm of reality.
I’m surprised that so many (40%) have plans to build a new PC in next two years. Especially because we are talking about PC Gamers, who are already PC Gamers. I would assume that most either do not, or upgrade instead build a new PC. From those 40% of 1.5k tomshardware readers who participated in the survey, I wonder in what state their PC are and if they HAVE to build a new PC or they just have a lot of money around and can afford it. Do they sell the old system or parts of it? Unfortunately these are unanswered at the moment.
I finally got round to a significant upgrade to my PC last week. I’ve been running the same PC for 10 years, and it’s really been dying. Fans and HDDs were failing, and it couldn’t play new games at all.
I haven’t replaced my GPU (still on a GTX 980ti) but I jumped to some decent DDR4 RAM, a better CPU, and moved into an SFF case, but I have no confidence any prices are set to stabilise, so I just gave in and built what I could.
I don’t believe in “just upgrading” at this point. If you built your PC with efficiency in mind, there’s like nothing you can even “upgrade”. Anything I can think of will get outdated by the time you need the next thing. A new GPU? Oh, you are still on Gen3… that means a new motherboard. Updating from AM4 to AM…4? Nah that feels like bad value, but AM5 requires DDR5, both of which have already been out for almost 5 years and will likely get replaced in a year or 2. Upgrading RAM? Again, just bumping DDR4 for a marginally better/larger cap DDR4 feels like bad value and unwarranted. Storage? Whoops, your old motherboard doesn’t support NVMe booting and it’s BIOS hasn’t been touched in over 5 years! You are lucky if you even have an M.2 slot.
And believe it or not, these prices are not even the worst they’ve ever been, so might as well just get a new PC every 5 or so years, maybe keep your old storage, CPU cooler, PSU and case, but that’s about it.
I recently built new to pass my current rig to my kid who is only interested in Roblox and other smaller games. And I mean the entire rig, including the desk.
Don’t forget this market insanity started around COVID, and has basically been succeeded by consequent crises with few dips.
The typical release cadence of PC components is around 4-6 years, which requires new motherboard, CPU, and RAM.
Adding in the GPU basically results in a new build, and that’s being generous assuming no upgrades/changes to other parts like PSU and storage.
My take is that a lot of these people wishing to upgrade are those who have simply been holding out since 2020 or earlier. This seems to vaguely match up with the Steam Hardware results, with a fair number of people still using RTX 3000 series or RX 6000 series, of which even the top end cards are starting to become par/outperformed by their modern mid level counterparts.
Not with AMD though. Usually the motherboard can be reused if you buy new generation of CPU and RAM (good luck if you have Intel, then you are screwed and need to change everything). But besides that, even after a few years upgrading graphics card and RAM is all you need to stay “competitive” to play top games. Maybe new SSD too. I don’t know how usual it is to upgrade parts along the way, not all at once. Especially in times like these just upgrading certain parts at a time is the only option for most.
In online communities at least, people seem to be keen to stay on the cutting edge and always have the best and shiniest. Toms Hardware is going to attract this very audience.
I accept that I’m probably too far the other way on the spectrum of patient gamers…but people don’t seem to think of the utility of the item and rather stay obsessed with “10% performance gains”. For the vast majority of people, phones, laptops and computers can easily last over 5 years (sometimes 10 years depending on use case).
Although these frequent upgraders do give a good stock of items for people like me to pick up and stay in the sweetspot of positioning behind the frontline of cutting edge products on the secondhand market.
Anecdotally but several of my friends build a new PC and then slide their old one to siblings who game but don’t need high end
that is the hand me down way, saves money to buy a new one. im not a heavy gamer but i do get hand me down from someone who games.
It’s way easier to get rid of an entire computer second hand than it is bespoke parts that you’ve replaced, so this is what I do too. I used to be on a 4-year cadence with new PCs, but then I kept getting more and more mileage out of my machines, since graphics don’t leap forward so quickly like they used to. My current machine is 5 years old and still runs the latest games on high settings.
Domated mine to the after school “day care”.
They helped me so much, I wanted to repay it in some capacity
Heeeey, it’s me! Your sibling! You got any of that sweet sweet ddr5 ram??? Don’t hold out on me, boy!
Well… I did upgrade mine progressively, I don’t think it still has any original parts, maybe some sata cables? I was able to get a smaller pc offspring out of this, ended up as my nephew’s gaming rig, does it count as my old rig? are both the same rig? damn computer of theseus causing philosophical problems!
I got my friends old box the same way. I’m into games that don’t require all that much. And will also use it to play minecraft with my kids.
Minecraft? MINECRAFT??? OH GOD NO!!! YOU WOULD NEED A $4,000 TOP OF THE LINE PC!!! 512GB RAM, 8 CORE, 16 THREAD AT 20GHZ EACH!!!
Gaming is too expensive. You should sell a kid.
Yeah I found that strange too most of my gaming PCs have lasted me somewhere between 7 and 10 years. Would seem completely unnecessary for most people
I just upgrade one or two parts every 2-4 years. seems to have worked fine for over a decade. dreading when I need to do a mobo update which will include ram
I replaced my old PC only because I went from an i5 6600 to a ryzen 7800x3d and thus needed to replace the RAM as well.
Combone that with an old 4GB 960 and an older 2TB HDD and wanting another case the math was quite easy.
It’s alao a quesrion how you interpret that? At what point is it a new PC vs upgrading? If you have replaced all parts from the original starting build?
Might explain the higher percentage
I would imagine that 40% is saying that hoping for a best case scenario to occur. Prices haven’t even plateaued yet, they are still rising, so at some point regardless their enthusiasm they will be priced out of the market.
The thought that hardware prices will drop to normal levels in the next few years is just wishful thinking.
Gotta end the whole PISS trend first and have them not replace it with anything the way they replaced crypto mining with PISS
The question is kind of weird. I want to build a new gaming computer, but that is nothing I’m doing at current prices and I can totally live without building a new one. If that one breaks, I might reconsider. But I really do not know if there are people around who are planning to build a new computer in May 2028.
I think you may overestimate how many people build their PCs instead of buying a prebuilt.
That’s not my estimation, that is the direct result of the survey.
It can be people budding into the genre. They’ve heard about how nice Steam is, and maybe play some games on a cheap laptop, but recognize a genuine desktop is the better experience.
One streamer I follow is in that situation. She streams off her PS5 and Switch, but has a donation incentive to help build her PC.
Not really, as the article is about PC Gamers who already have a PC. Otherwise they are not PC Gamers who want to build their next PC. I don’t think this survey is meant for newcomers, as far as I understand.
I might fall in that category, depending on how they’d ask me. I have a solid PC I built after crypto stopped inflating the prices but just before the RAM shortage and I’m mostly good, but I’ve got the money and have been thinking I could upgrade soon as a treat. Not at these prices though.
So it all depends if the situation improves in the next two years somewhat. This year? No chance, IMO. next year? Maybe. Maybe I’m too optimistic. But I definitely wouldn’t rule out be building a new PC in that timeframe.
i built a monster pc in 2024 and maxed out the RAM and CPU the motherboard could handle. New 4k monitor and a 32gb RTX video card. I think I spent about $1.5k
no way could I get that stuff for the same price. I could probably sell the parts for more
it’s still a monster and in Linux, I can tweak it just a bit more to get everything it can give.
I’m thinking that the way games have progressed in the last 5 years, there’s nothing on the horizon that says prepare for the new technology that will blow my mind
32g vram gpu for less than 2k is unlikely. A 4090 itself would be close to 2k
There… is only a single, mainline, broadly available RTX GPU with 32gb VRAM.
It’s the 5090 RTX.
Which came out in January of 2025.
At an MSRP of $2,000.
With many partner models considerably exceeding that, up to as high as $5,000.
Not only is the pricing ludicrous, the timing is not possible.
The only thing in 2024 or prior I can find with 32 gb vram is basically an unofficial mod or variant called the RTX 4090 D, that never left China, or, maybe it would be something like about as hard to find as a GRE variant AMD card in the US.
I guess unless this person’s uncle works at
NintendoNvidia, or something.Outside of that, we’re talking workstation/server type GPUs, generally with even more ludicrous pricing.
This person is either very confused or very bad at lying.
Also wtf does ‘maxed out the system ram’ even mean?
You can get 128gb of sys ram into… most middle to higher tier mobos with 4 dimm slots. Many higher tier pc mobos can do 256gb.
???
“Oh yeah I got the video card for free”
That’s honestly the only explanation for that build at just 1.5k. More likely they’re just a stinking liar 😅
With the specs they’ve claimed and that price, they either got much of it for free or are… yeah, straight-up lying. That price will get the case, mobo, CPU, RAM, PSU, and storage, probably. Maybe not even that much, if it’s all high-end stuff, before prices inflated. GPU and high-end monitor? Nah.
A high end monitor alone cost third the 2k budget. (Edit: edited, Edit 2: edited part 2)
For real, especially a few years ago. Now though, the 1440p/OLED/240hz version of my Acer Predator 27” is like 350 or less! Incredible deal.
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I can currently just barely figure out how to do a 9070 (non XT), 24gb DDR5, 1TB SSD via an AOOStar Gem 12 (soldered on 8745hs, iirc) total setup for the rig, at just a bit above $1500 before tax.
Without a monitor, of course.
That’s like the absolute most bang i can figure how to squeeze out of the least bucks, and its a non tradtional setup that works via a dock/cradle and Oculink (cost of that is included).
Doing the same specs in a traditional PC just ends up being more expensive, though its debatable as to whether the approximately 10% to 15% max performance hit on the GPU that OcuLink incurs in highly demanding scenarios makes that 100% true.
So yeah, this… this person is like, hilariously out of the realm of reality.