Consider this hypothetical scenario: You’re upgrading your gaming rig and you’re second-guessing the hardware you’ve chosen.
In fact, you’re so fed up with the performance of your old hardware you feel an overwhelming urge to just splurge on the most expensive hardware you can possibly find to totally max out your specs — 4K curved gaming monitor, Intel Core i9-14900KS with a whopping 6.2GHz max boost — whatever it takes.
There’s just one problem: The new price makes your stomach squirm — A LOT. Sound familiar?
It’s a scenario that every gamer faces from time to time, myself included. It’s just that, the performance of my gaming hardware is probably the single most important factor in determining whether I shine on the leaderboards or just crash and burn on the dregs list.
But take it from me, you need to resist the temptation to always buy the best of the best hardware with all your mental fortitude — apply self-calming mantras, use meditation, heck, even ask your friends to intervene if you must, but just don’t do it. Why? It’s not worth it when all is said and done. Let me explain…
A balancing act
My reasons are twofold. The first point is that I’m not necessarily going to get better performance with the highest-spec gear than I would if I opted for the lower-spec gear. More times than not, I’ll just end up spending more money — so it’s about the value-for-money proposition. By the same logic, I don’t want to be so cheap that I lose too much performance. So, making smart choices is the name of the game.
Take the Intel Core i9-14900K CPU, as an example. It may have Intel’s Raptor Lake refresh “14” designation but it shares the same architecture as the previous generation Intel Core i9-13900K and boasts just minor upticks to its base and boost clocks. Benchmark comparisons show just a 2 percent increase in speed over its forebear.
What’s more, some reviewers have found that the Core i9-14900K runs a little hot, is power hungry, and, the kicker: It costs $60 more than the Core i9-13900K (at Newegg). Admittedly, that’s not a huge amount of money, but when you factor in the same being true for each hardware component you upgrade, you could be staring down the barrel of somewhere between a $250 to $500 price difference for your hardware, for very little performance benefit.
Instead, with a little savvy research, you could find yourself a Core i9-13900K at a marked-down price from it’s original sale price. But that’s just for starters…. There are countless products that punch above their price tags for value and performance. The HyperX Pulsefire Haste 2 Wireless gaming mouse and the SteelSeries Arctis Nova 7X gaming headset are two that come to mind in the gaming peripherals category.
Another great example is the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX desktop graphics card. Benchmark comparisons show Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4090 has about a 3 to 10 percent performance edge over this card in 4K gaming benchmarks. But then again, I’d only really get that benefit if I were gaming in 4K, which I very rarely do; the AMD RX 7900 XTX does actually outperform the RTX 4090 at some benchmarks run at lower resolutions. Plus, it’s a whole $700 cheaper.
Timing the market
I’m not dissing the RTX 4090. It’s a fantastic card that I would thank my lucky stars to have. But there is perhaps another reason to not go all out on an RTX 4090 or another equally expensive piece of hardware, which brings me to my second point. That is, as good as they are now, they’re not going to be top dogs for very long.
To be sure, it takes less than a year for almost all the products in a gaming brand’s line to be dethroned by better products, so you’ve really got to keep that in mind.
Sure, an RTX 4090 might future-proof my performance for years to come, but if we see an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 GPU next year, it will probably show very similar performance. In fact, I find I can get big leaps in my PC’s performance by upgrading to midrange hardware with a year or so pause between releases.
Indeed, to use the humble GPU as an example, by resisting the urge to buy an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 when it was released at the MSRP of $1,599 and instead waiting and purchasing an RTX 4070 a while later, I saved myself $900, which I then used to upgrade my monitor and some other hardware components, to make my PC an all-round better performer.
Now, rather than just having a GPU that can shred, I now have a monitor that can keep up with the fast frame rates my GPU can throw at it.
Justifying that decision is also the fact that the RTX 3090 shows just 11 percent better performance than the RTX 4070 in some benchmarks, which I can live with.
So, there’s some food for thought. Your budget will determine whether you’re even in the ballpark for high-end hardware, but even if you are, you can still shop around for hardware that will give you great performance for what you want to pay.