I am thinking of upgrading my PC and possibly monitor. I have had this system 6 years now. I only play wow and want to play on the best settings. Is it worth upgrading?? Any advice appreciated.
Do the components of the system need upgrading? Some do; the ones that are easiest to do would be the RAM (replace that 8GB with 16GB) & replacing your HDD with an SSD, to make Windows & WoW boot/load faster… keep the HDD for storing vital documents, mind, so they don’t get lost on a Windows/disk replacement
You could do with a better graphics card, but that leads to a different question…
Is it “economically” worth upgrading…? No. That’s a brutal but truthful answer due in no small part to silicon - the core of all electronics/microprocessors - being in pretty awful supply due to Covid-19 enforced limitations on working practices & logistics; if the plants that make components can’t get their raw materials, they can’t make the bits needed to make the cards that computers - even CARS - need to be built with.
Add to that, Covid-19 has decreed that more people than ever have been made to stay & home for work/school so demand for PC’s has shot through the roof.
What’s also made things worse is that cryptocurrency mining has hit a boom so demand for some PC components have been diverted by the legions of fast money addicts.
While we’re on the subject of fast-money addicts, parts like graphics cards & CPU’s are also ma-HOO-sive targets for ‘scalpers’, who buy what limited supplies are out there & resell them for two, three or more times the (recommended) price - 'cos they can & they know that “some” uninitiated in the field of the economics of components will (unwittingly) pay what they ask…
Most PC gamers are in the same boat, many of who upgrade some part of their machines annually; your system being (ordinarily) “ripe for upgrading” makes the above a harder pill to swallow.
That and you have to consider the fact the two main plants that fabricate chips have likely had to change the way the workforces in them work in order to make it a safe environment for all concerned and I am sure that must have been both costly and difficult to do as chip fabrication is a complex process and expensive as well without the current pandemic.
I was extremely lucky last year in October to be able to get my entire new machine built I am glad I did but seeing the way things have gone the past three months I am damn thankful I did what I did then than leaving it till now. I predict it will be another year or so before any sense of normality will be back for PC parts and I also am of the view a lot can be done to stop botting and scalping which has plagued the costs of what little parts that are out there.
A real kick in the gut for anyone contemplating a new machine or even upgrading now.
What are you referring to. TSMC, Samsung (and Intel) have more than a plant, but multiple fabs, usually in multiple places around the world (although a lot of in Korea and Taiwan).
The pandemic caused problems with logistics and availability of components but also created insane demand no one predicted (production is planed around 1Y prior). Even though Nvidia made bit more Ampere GPUs than Turing it was way way not enough to saturate the market. Same with AMD booking wafers at TSMC. The problem isn’t with a fab having problem but with overall shortage on everything + USA vs China wars limiting Chinese fabs which limit like US car makers (and others).
The GPU market is expected to normalize after more than a year from now, while CPUs and small GPUs should be quite available. Right now it’s easy to get quite good value on a laptop while you pretty much can’t build a PC with at least decent dGPU. People are buying RX 550, GT 1030, 710 or CPUs with iGPUs to add actual dGPU later when they find one.
What Aranaria meant was the restrictions in working practices within the fab’s when Covid-19 originally hit… meaning that no-one was allowed to work IN the fab’s to produce ‘chips’; but, yes - even if the amount of whichever new product was equal to the out-going generation of the same product, predictions were woefully short, as you said, for the no. of people who ended up having to work/educate from home & required a PC to do so.
I know that. I also have experience of working in heavy industry admittedly not this kind but I have worked in large industrial plants and I would hazard a guess that Covid-19 and social distancing in such a industry as those who fabricate chips would have been expensive and also a logistical nightmare because you have to reduce the numbers of people in close proximity to each other.
Where I use to work I we had to work in twos because of the chemicals we handled and the risks they posed and it meant being at times in close proximity doing certain things I am sure there are various aspects in fabrication of chips that need two maybe more people bunched up to do them properly and when you have to be 2 meters or six feet from each other that’s not possible. So there would have been a huge knock on effect regardless of the number of plants that exist.