[damien c]

Unfortunately prices are high because people have been willing to pay the prices that Intel and nVidia have charged for products.

Added to that was Covid which reduced production levels of core materials required for the components, and then you got hit with nVidia reducing production and supply of components to the Retail market in order to justify their extortionate pricing.

They even admitted to it on an "Earning's Call" and were found to be directly selling GPU's that were meant for the Retail market to Crypto Miners, because they were willing to pay X percentage over Retail to get the cards.

Then once that was sort of over, you get the Ukraine/Russia situation and the Oil/Fuel Cartel bumping the price to transport components and materials around which also jacked the prices up.


If you want to buy 2nd hand, then wait till the Mid/End Jan 2024 as nVidia are announcing new cards around the 8th Jan 2024, which will cause a bunch of used 40 series cards to hit the likes of Ebay, and will cause the prices of the 30 series cards on there to drop.

A 2nd hand Intel 11000 series and above CPU would be a good choice, or an AMD 5000 series CPU would be another good shout.

In terms of motherboards, with AMD you don't need a X570 board, you can go with a B550 and that will typically get you basically the same level of performance but you might not get 2.5G Lan and Wi-Fi etc etc.

Avoid 2nd hand Xeons if you game, the lower base core clock is not worth the 10% to 50% performance drop for the sake of a few quid, but if your not gaming then a 2nd hand Xeon would be a great shout.



Laptop's are getting pricey now because they offer basically the same level of performance as a desktop pc whilst remaining quiet and offering, the flexibility of moving around with them.

I have an MSI Stealth 15 laptop, that performs in the games I currently play at about 80% of the performance of my main pc and that laptop cost less than the GPU in my main pc alone!

I can sit playing games on that thing all day with no issues, even play games then jump in to video editing, recording a DJ Mix etc and have no issues.

Storage wise, well SSD's are a lot cheaper than they used to be, because NAND flash is a lot cheaper at the moment, so you can pick up a 1TB 2.5" SSD from the likes of Crucial for around £50, or a 1TB NVME Drive from the likes of Samsung for £70.

I am looking at a possible all SSD Server and a 4TB NVME drive is only £200 or there abouts when not on sale, currently on Amazon you can get a 4TB NVME PCI-E 4.0 drive for £169.99!


If you want brand new, then I would suggest a pre-built but try to avoid the likes of HP etc because they are all heavily overpriced for the quality of the components they provide, I would be looking at the likes of Scan/Overclockers/PC Specialist or one of the other "Custom Pre-Built" PC Builders, as they will often use off the shelf parts as you would, but they get them cheaper so don't jack the price up to much.

If you want brand new and a custom build, then start looking at the likes of PCPartpicker UK, it will let you build out a system and show the cheapest places to get the stuff from, but be warned they don't just go for the cheapest place, make sure you check them out first to see if they are "Reputable".