How long do your $1000 rigs last you?

[toughtrasher]

Simple question

I'm looking to buy a $1000 some time either this week or just hold it off until December. Before I buy anything, I want to know how long the computer will last me, in terms of playing modern games at a decent framerate?

I will be creating my own custom machine or if I get lazy I'll probably just buy a ready-made one

 

[BrightCandle]

Depends on how much you are willing to drop the quality down. You might consider it fine for 5 years or 6 months depending on your outlook of acceptable quality.

 

[Remobz]

One lasted me for like 7 years more or less.

 

[DaveSimmons]

If it has a decent CPU you might just need to upgrade the video card in 2-3 years.

I typically go ~3 years between upgrades, but then can re-use parts like the $100 case, $15 DVD drive, possibly the hard drives.

 

[runzwithsizorz]

I will be creating my own custom machine or if I get lazy I'll probably just buy a ready-made one

Build your own...parts will be better at less cost, IF you are concerned with longevity.
Our old (home built)computer lasted 8 years and is srill going strong...just upgraded the mobo/cpu/ram and still using 460gtx sli, can play most games at med to hi. Also built a new gaming rig for me, but that's another story.

The Wife

 

[mfenn]

As BrightCandle said, it depends on your definition of decent settings and framerate. 5 years is a reasonable estimate for the core system (CPU, mobo, drives, case, PSU). The GPU will probably need to be upgraded in 2-3 years and perhaps the RAM at that time as well.

 

[magomago]

honestly it all depends. in this day and age, PCs have very strong staying power. I built a sandybridge rig with 16gigs of ram (far overkill, 8gig even today is plenty) and sli gtx460s, and i still play anything i want fine. I might upgrade videocards, but I really have no reason to.

given the technology on the market, i don't see the next iteration of anything will be considered a game changer other than buying you another 5-10%.

Everyone expected IB to be so much more, it was just about 5-10%, everything expected Haswell to be so much more, its really just another 5%. Hell, people started running to IB acting like it was a better overclocker

Everything expected the 7XX series to be so much more, but AMD just sat and waited.

If you wait till December, the only thing you'll gain is maybe a better videocard (I dont' really know much about the latest videocard news).

IMO if you have games you want to play NOW, I'd build my system around that. The 7950 is a steal right now in Hot Deals, and thats probably good enough for anything you want for the next year or so.

I'd build thinking ~3 years in mind; anything more is just a cherry on top, and if 3 years doesn't materialize because something new breaks onto the market and captivates everyone, that is just the way it is.

 

[toughtrasher]

Thanks for all the responses guys.

So shelling out maybe $300 or so every 3-4 years will keep the machine well maintained for quite a long time? Say.. 10 years?

 

[Torn Mind]

Processing hardware, such as the CPU and GPU, remain relatively constant in their performance. The changes in performance is mostly situated in the storage and software; Software becomes better optimized and faster(yeah, doesn't happen much) or it becomes fatter and it takes longer to finish tasks. Conventional HDDs and SSDs both "fill up" to the point some maintenance is required to restore their "out of box" performance. RAM becoming an issue will depend on the software you use. 8 GBs can serve most tasks, but Photoshop gobbles it up like there is no tomorrow.

But yeah, longevity is dependent on whether you want your software to run, depending on the case, slightly or much more faster along with the opposing force of saving money.

 

[Sleepingforest]

Simple question

I'm looking to buy a $1000 some time either this week or just hold it off until December...

I will be creating my own custom machine or if I get lazy I'll probably just buy a ready-made one

If you're planning on spending $1000 either way, then you should build it yourself. An OEM (prebuilt) machine is always less cost effective at that price point. Buying a prebuilt one saves you no money in the long run, since you'll just have to replace it more frequently due to the less powerful parts within.

 

[mikeymikec]

If you're planning on spending $1000 either way, then you should build it yourself. An OEM (prebuilt) machine is always less cost effective at that price point. Buying a prebuilt one saves you no money in the long run, since you'll just have to replace it more frequently due to the less powerful parts within.

And the cheaping out on parts like the PSU or board.

A customer had a Dell machine that they wanted upgrading. It came with an AMD Sempron AM3, I had a spare Athlon II X4 630, but the board lasted about a year with it in. I suspect that the board couldn't handle the latter's increased power requirements (the PSU survived in that situation, but it's much more common for a cheap PSU to be used).

 

[pandemonium]

Thanks for all the responses guys.

So shelling out maybe $300 or so every 3-4 years will keep the machine well maintained for quite a long time? Say.. 10 years?

Not necesarilly. You'll - at some point - have the large update to the majority of the platform (MoBo, CPU, RAM should be done simultaneously).

You can easily go for 3 years between upgrade frequencies of components and refresh any failed/lacking components in there to maintain a workable higher-end machine indefinitely. There's no solid evidence of form factor being negated in the near future, but at this point it wouldn't be unreasonable to presume usefulness for hardware on the shelves today lasting for 10 years+.

The way I see it, is it's always cheaper in the short term and long term to custom build with quality components instead of buying a prebuilt; one major reason being that you can be guaranteed at least one lacking/cheap component in the prebuilt machine that may be rendered useless when it comes time to refresh other components or simply fails prematurely.

The only reason to buy prebuilt is for the support. Which usually ends up being a major headache instead of the notioned convenience.

I typically go for 6 years, on average, between entire platform updates (all components being replaced from original; including failures and lacking functionality).

If I use my Newegg and Amazon history, I can average my $ spent over the last 12 years on all computer components used in my primary PC. I typically buy at the bottom of the curve, near the top of mid-range to high-end components. The unfortunate thing is pre 2001 I used catalogs to order my parts and don't have access to that right now (PCshopper and Aberdeen were 2 major ordering catalogs I remember).

Regardless, for the last 12 years:

-Including my enthusiast spending (higher CFM fans, HSF assemblies, UPS, high-end keyboard, mouse/pad, etc.) = Average of $287.91/year.

-Not Including any enthusiast spending and only the bare essentials = Average of $250.67/year.

Summary: One can surmise a decent gaming rig that plays at medium-high quality settings will cost you a revolving ~$275/year.

 

[Sleepingforest]

Summary: One can surmise a decent gaming rig that plays at medium-high quality settings will cost you a revolving ~$275/year.

I disagree. If you take mfenn's $1000 build from around December 2012, you'd have a 7970, an OC'd i5-3570K, an SSD, and 8GB RAM. That build would still be getting max settings in most games at 1080p and ~60 frames per second. If you're willing to setting for medium, you can probably wait quite a few years. The 5970 from 2009 still pulls respectable framerates at high with AA in games like Battlefield 3 and Skyrim--at medium, it would certainly perform well enough.

I myself built a rig which was about $1000 for the PC itself around November, and I have yet to spend any more on it.

 

[monkeydelmagico]

^ Nice analysis pandemonium. I've been tracking my spending via excel build sheets since around 2005. 2005-2011 had been strictly budget rigs with an annual average spending of $158.- not including games. This past year or so I've gone after some nicer parts. 2011-now average is $232. per year.

 

[magomago]

I disagree. If you take mfenn's $1000 build from around December 2012, you'd have a 7970, an OC'd i5-3570K, an SSD, and 8GB RAM. That build would still be getting max settings in most games at 1080p and ~60 frames per second. If you're willing to setting for medium, you can probably wait quite a few years. The 5970 from 2009 still pulls respectable framerates at high with AA in games like Battlefield 3 and Skyrim--at medium, it would certainly perform well enough.

I myself built a rig which was about $1000 for the PC itself around November, and I have yet to spend any more on it.

I think its entirely reasonable actually.

Tempering expectations is appropriate because sometimes people get romanticized visions: 5 years with a videocard on ultra settings is hard to achieve.

Lets look at the 5870 --> the card came out Q4 of 2009 (end of September), and was in hard supply for a while, and was the flagship card. It also cost nearly 400 dollars at launch, and the price even went up a little bit once the GTX480 launched.

Yes, for those that chose to spend that kind of money on the flagship, they got a great bargain that no one would have predicted. But most people don't get the top tier of videocards --> they get GTX460s and ask if they can play high settings for the next 5 years.

That is why I think ~250/year is reasonable.

 

[Sonikku]

On the one hand computers aren't advancing at a ludicrous degree like they were during the 90's where a computer one year would seemingly be a generation ahead of the one last year. So in that respect, things have "stabilized". On the other hand, things like being able to buy a pentium 4 mobo/cpu and then keeping the machine running years later by dropping a brand new core 2 duo with the same socket into the same motherboard are long gone. As are the days of being able to overclock the hell out of processors. Intel will always go with a new socket when making a new cpu to ensure you have to buy another board just as surely as they will lock all the multipliers on all but their most high end of chips to stop you from overclocking. So as for over all system longevity, it kind of depends.

 

[aigomorla]

As others have said its all situational
If ur friend stays on 1920x1080 it could last a while.
She may need gpu upgrades at year 3-5.

If ur friend gets greedy and goes 1440p... That 1000 won't get u very far past the gpu alone.

 

[wb182]

As others have alluded to, it's all about what your expectations are in terms of gaming. "Decent" framerates varies based on the user, video quality settings, and most importantly the display resolution.

For the past year, I've been gaming at 1600x900 with my Sony laptop rocking a 640m LE Kepler. It's not ideal, but I still run things like Borderlands 2, Bioshock Infinite, and Arkham City at mostly high settings.

If you're talking about 1080p gaming and you're willing to make the occasional compromise on shadows and AA, then I think mfenn's 7970 build should easily last over 3 years...possibly 5 with "decent framerates on current games". At that point, throw another $300 video card at it and extend the life another 2-3 years.

 

[toughtrasher]

Hmm, awesome replies everyone, thank you

I say the average amount of video ram a game requires today is probably 512 MB, correct?
What would you say this number looked like perhaps 5 years down the road?

This is just a curiosity question, so take it easy

 

[spat55]

I've had mine a year so far, and the only thing I have upgraded is, a second hand HD 7850 (£100), Asus Xonar (£25) and a hyper evo 212 cooler for (£25) so it has been a £150 upgrade, now I consider this to last me 5 years with a new graphics card some time down the line. Might be getting a SSD soon too...

 

[Sleepingforest]

Hmm, awesome replies everyone, thank you

I say the average amount of video ram a game requires today is probably 512 MB, correct?
What would you say this number looked like perhaps 5 years down the road?

This is just a curiosity question, so take it easy

I'm going to quote myself from an older thread:

Here's a graph I developed in Excel using PC games (2-3 PC games a year, mostly PC exclusives but some console ports, from 2003 to 2013). Many points overlap, so it looks like far fewer:

RAM requirements increased by 2^3 or 2^4 since 2003. However, the rate has stagnated since 2010, floating at 4GB or so, likely because of "legacy" support for 32-bit OSes. Even before then, you can see that the games take longer and longer between each doubling (a year at 256MB, three years at 512MB, 3 years at 2GB, 4 years at 4GB). Until a majority of computers and consoles can utilize more than 8GB (in the case of consoles, between the VRAM and the RAM), I don't think we'll see more than 4GB. Even the new consoles probably won't push past 5 or 6GB of RAM, since much of that needs to go to the GPU (shared space for RAM in consoles).

Additionally, more and more people are finding computers adequate for usage as the market matures, which pushes the need to upgrade down. That means that browsers and other programs don't have as much space to push for and take advantage of. I don't forsee needing more than 8GB for several years (past 2015, I would think).

 

[HardcoreRobot]

they last me about 4 years

 

[pandemonium]

I disagree. If you take mfenn's $1000 build from around December 2012, you'd have a 7970, an OC'd i5-3570K, an SSD, and 8GB RAM. That build would still be getting max settings in most games at 1080p and ~60 frames per second. If you're willing to setting for medium, you can probably wait quite a few years. The 5970 from 2009 still pulls respectable framerates at high with AA in games like Battlefield 3 and Skyrim--at medium, it would certainly perform well enough.

I myself built a rig which was about $1000 for the PC itself around November, and I have yet to spend any more on it.

You can't project from today to several years from now. That's not an established analysis. There is no room for agreement or disagreement with the numbers I provided; they simply are. Those numbers are directly from my spending at a moderate enthusiast level.

Here's the quick spreadsheet.

 

[Torn Mind]

I disagree. If you take mfenn's $1000 build from around December 2012, you'd have a 7970, an OC'd i5-3570K, an SSD, and 8GB RAM. That build would still be getting max settings in most games at 1080p and ~60 frames per second. If you're willing to setting for medium, you can probably wait quite a few years. The 5970 from 2009 still pulls respectable framerates at high with AA in games like Battlefield 3 and Skyrim--at medium, it would certainly perform well enough.

I myself built a rig which was about $1000 for the PC itself around November, and I have yet to spend any more on it.

Welcome to the realm of statistics, where people make hasty and overzealous conclusions about numbers.
Well, has figure is an average. The average is only a marker for the "center point" of a set of data. That average tells you nothing about how spread out the data is(variance) or minima and maxima. Right now, your $1000 rig is not even a year old, so its derived average is actually over $1000 right now and steadily decreasing as time passes.

 

[toughtrasher]

I'm going to quote myself from an older thread:

So by those statistics, it's safe to assume that in the 2015-2016 range, requirements for RAM will be around 8GB-12GB?

they last me about 4 years

Without any upgrades?