Do I Really Want to Upgrade? And if so…how?

It is the best of times. It is the worst of times. I am probably at my most disposed as I have ever been in life to basically do whatever the hell it is I want to do. I am also disposed to consider that there are not that many decades of life left, in all likelihood, and so many of the turns I take now, I may be doing so for the last time. So minded, I am in the process of one of my last, big, hardware-reviewer-lifestyle, recapitalizations. I recently picked up the iPhone 13. My Samsung Galaxy Z Fold3 5G arrives tomorrow (fingers crossed). The iPhone 13 was at no cost due to Verizon’s current trade-in deal on my iPhone XR; the Fold got a significant amount knocked off due to trading in my Galaxy Note20 Ultra 5G. What will be up to bat soon is my gaming PCs. A time which should be filled with wondrous joy. And yet I have agonized over this step most of all. 

I’ve seen recent puff-pieces from some bloggers; about PC hardware and upgrades. Posts about how even an RTX 3080 laptop couldn’t make them fall in love with PC gaming. A click-baity headline meant to make die-hard gear-heads incited and froth at the mouth. That individual’s dislike of PC gaming had nothing whatsoever to do with hardware or graphics and even a rack full of 2U chassis with dedicated GPUs wouldn’t have made a difference. Another about how a poster just now figured out that the most sensible way to procure a current-gen GPU in this age of chip scarcity was to buy a pre-built PC. Eye roll. I figured that out last holiday season. I’ve been triaging and running various Monte Carlo simulations about the upcoming PC upgrades for months.

I’ve built over a hundred systems in 20+ years of building PCs, so there’s little else for me to explore. No; it’s something else I cannot quite put my finger on. And I’ve been trying to nail that down, because there was a time that juggling a ton of variables and coming up with an optimal upgrade package would put a smile on my face before I even went to order parts.

I don’t truly need to upgrade CPUs, in all honesty. I have typically skipped a generation, and I’m on Zen2 Ryzen CPUs right now. I could wait until whatever comes after Zen3. I skipped the 2000-series Ryzen procs; even though the latest procs are Zen3, I’d still be ok waiting. When I was on 800-series nVidia GPUs, I skipped the 900s and next upgraded in the 10XX-series GTX GPUs. I have RTX 2070s and AMD RX 5700XT’s now. I know the 3000’s are much improved in the ray-tracing department. But still….I could wait.

It’s replacement will just be another low-profile cube case. Nothing that unique. I will also admit a bit of FOMO over the Xbox (I have the Series S but want a Series X), and feel like I’d rather have that over a PC upgrade, given that I have plenty of performance overhead in my various configs.

So maybe it is that I have not found the best optimization fit between needing to upgrade cases, moboards, and power supplies, and not necessarily needing to upgrade CPUS and GPUs….all of which are in different machines and I don’t want to have to swap a ton of parts around if I’m buying at least a partially built box. Maybe I would feel better starting completely over with an entirely new build, rather than trying to cut this fine line in between my existing builds and an upgrade that makes sense.

All of this has been going through my head and I have churned the variables in an infinite number of calculations and logic equations. At the end of the day, I am going to upgrade. And maybe it doesn’t even matter exactly how or what. The wonder and the love affair that I have always had with hardware is that I embarked on those journeys out of nothing more than curiosity and exploration. It wasn’t because I had to, and I did not always limit myself out of necessity, but often just for the budgetary challenge of solutioning within a given set of constraints. Upgrade? Yes. Why? Just because it’s time to go on another adventure.