Is the PC market becoming ridiculous? (1080p vs 1440p)

[scaryjim]

... Expensive components are expensive, and always have been. You do get bargains, I'm sure when I got my Athlon 1.33GHz it was just about the fastest CPU you could buy and only about £150, but mostly all the machines I built over the the last 20 odd years have been down to a budget.

True enough, and of course a 25% fluctuation in price might be more keenly felt if you're looking at the difference between £100 and £125 for a component than if you're looking at the difference between £400 and £500. Chances are if you could afford £400 then £500 isn't going to be completely out of reach, whereas if you could only afford £100 you're already going to be tight up against your budget. My experience is mostly down at the budget end...

[GuidoLS]

I take your point, but with Titan X Nvidia has removed the double precision compute capability that made previous Titans such a good deal to the people who use GPUs for scientific applications. Also, my contention is that Nvidia are taking advantage of the ultra-enthusiast market blatantly as the only tangible advantage that the Titan X possesses over the 980Ti, a card that was only released a couple of months later, is double the VRAM yet you pay much more than is reasonable for this(£300-400 not $100), so the "you get what you pay for" argument does not quite hold water in my opinion.

If people are willing to spend money on something they can't use to full capacity, that's their issue, and not the manufacturer. It's why most of us fantasize about owning a Ferrari or Lamborghini or Lola or high end Porsche instead of actually buying one. If you can't use all of it, you're either wasting it or you're hurting it, or you drive like an idiot and you wrap it around a utility pole. They'd be taking advantage of people if there were no other option. There are LOTS of other options.

[darmz]

i Disagree with you totally, i made a 1440p build for £1000 recently, its very doable i think theres reasonable value out there in terms of bang for buck currently.

[zzkenseizz]

The problem is when you want to experience new tech you have to upgrade all of your old build and the cost for upgrade to newest high end build is high and few year latter you have to upgrade all agains or constantly upgrade if you want to keep up with the trend. So give yourself some brake and rest until you really think you need a new one and can afford it

[Captain Fizz]

I fell out of the rat race as my i5 750 (3.8GHz) with GTX460 played games "well enough" on the 1920 x 1200 monitor.
In fact I didn't feel the need to upgrade much (had a GTX660 ready to go in)

Recently upgraded to 1440p and GTX980Ti, 6700k etc. Amagad, so smooth / shiny!
So yes, it was 2k using the current monitor, 3k once the monitor & GFX card upgraded to cope!

But should do me for 5 years or so Maybe a GFX Card upgrade at some point between.

So whilst I am no longer keeping up with the new tech, a large payment every now and then ensures it's an amazing gaming for 2~3 years and 'good enough' for 2~3 years

[Ferral]

For me I have been dipping in an out of PC Gaming due to the high VRAM requirements on a lot of the games now. Come Christmas this year I will be upgrading to something like a GTX 960 or R9 380 but sticking with my Quad Phenom 2 965BE until something comes along to really replace it, possibly get something like an AMD A series with higher clocks etc with it being cheaper.

Granted over 10 years ago before marriage and kids I bought a new graphics card around every 10 month or so, usually going for upper mid range stuff, similar thing with upgrading board and CPU.

Now though got to take into account everything else, life in general has stopped me upgrading often and I am still coping with the new build I done from mid 2011, my system is only struggling with newest stuff and main issue is mainly the VRAM.

I now have a PS4 which is great for exclusives and I have stuff like Witcher 3 on it as I do honestly prefer using a controller now over KB & Mouse, most cases I will use a controller over classic PC controls, even use X Padder to set up profiles for certain older games.

[R9 295X2]

Agree. Some of the new monitors out soon are ridiculous: £800 for an IPS Gsync 1440p 165hz is completely stupid. No way that you'll be able to power it without turning down a few options in games. 165FPS is extreme in majority of AAA games but what about "indie games"? I highly doubt you'll pay £800 to play indie games in 1440p at 165fps and even if you could most indie games are capped at 60, even 30 at times. There is no need for a monitor of this magnitude yet and anyone buying it needs to think about what they're doing.