My current PC has an RX 590, an older i3 processor, 16 GB of DDR4 RAM, and a 100 GB SSD plus a 1 TB SSD. The CPU often reaches around 80% usage while booting and about 60% during normal browsing, and I frequently experience freezes when multitasking with many browser tabs.
I'm considering building a new system with an RX 9070 XT, Ryzen 7 9800X3D, 32 GB of RAM, and 2 TB of storage. I mostly browse the web, play games such as Overwatch 2, modded Minecraft, Counter-Strike, and Skyrim, and occasionally buy a demanding new game that I may play for around 100 hours.
The build would cost roughly €2,000 new or about €1,700 used. I may join the army in one or two years, so I'm unsure whether I should spend that much now, buy something more modest, or wait several years and risk prices and hardware changing. I'd like to avoid needing another major upgrade for around ten years, but I'm worried that an expensive high-end build could still become outdated quickly. What would be the most sensible approach?
2 Answers
Your current CPU and limited memory are probably the main causes of the freezes, rather than a need for an extreme gaming build. Consider upgrading those parts first, or build a balanced midrange PC instead of buying the fastest available processor and graphics card. No system can realistically be guaranteed to remain high-end for ten years, so spending less now and upgrading later may be safer.
Since you might be away with the army in a year or two, I wouldn’t spend heavily on a top-end system yet. A more reasonably priced build that lasts through that period would make more sense. Moving to 32 GB of RAM could also reduce a lot of the stuttering, and an AM4-based system may be sufficient for your current games and multitasking without the €2,000 price tag.
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