Hello PC shopper land,
I am Dave, your friendly neighborhood PC sales exec. I wanted to quickly go over a common misconception (or rather, common knowledge turned myth) when buying a PC from a high end builder like us.
My fellow sales execs and I often hear “I don’t want my PC to be obsolete in 2 years” or even the self-defeating “I know this will be obsolete 6 months from now” when talking to customers. While this was true about a decade ago, here in 2017 it couldn’t be further from the truth.
While new tech is often being released every few months, the performance gains are not as drastic as they were at the turn of the century. For instance, the Kabylake Intel processors that were just released this year. The i7-7700k is a fantastic i7 core processor with exceptional overclocking capability, so that renders its predecessor the i7-6700k Skylake processor obsolete, right?
Not really. At least not when you use retail grade parts like we do . While there will always be considerable gains for each new generation release, The 6700k is still a very viable processor. While Skylake lacks the overclocking capabilities the Kabylake does, the base clock speeds are similar within 10% of each other, and when not over clocking, the wattage doesn’t have much variation between the two. The Kabylake 7700k paired with a Z270 motherboard does give some additional features such as additional PCI lanes, but again these don’t cause the 6700k to be a forgotten memory.
The same goes for video cards, the 1000 series video cards are fantastic and while those gains from Maxwell to Pascal are quite noticable, a GTX970 will still run almost every game on the market with little issue, as would a GTX1070. However, as with each new generation, there is added benefit (such as more cuda cores and higher clock speeds) to the new components.
The gains to be had that are absolutely worth the money if you are able to buy the latest and greatest, but you purchasing your 7700k cpu today will not cause instant regret when the next line of processors is released in the coming years.
This absolutely varies on your uses and goals of course, but most of our machines are good for several years and remain viable for years to come. This is coming from a VM owner still rocking an i7-3770k with a GTX1060 and enjoys Battlefield 1 in ultra-settings on a 27” 1080p monitor.
It is because of processor longevity and video card pairings that we offer a life time upgrade program to our customers. You can keep your VM system humming along nicely as I have with a slightly older processor just by updating your video card every 2nd or 3rd generation release, making your investment that much better.
If you have questions, feel free to give me an email directly or you can contact the sales team at 888-300-4450 x1 and we will help you with all of your PC needs, new or upgrading.
Dave Dobbins
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