Gradually building new PC

[Matt174e]

I plan to have a PC built with the consumer Oculus Rift in mind. I have 6 months to a year to have it completed, so I have lots of time.

So far all I have is the case, it's a Fractal Refine R4 which I got for $40 off.

I'm wondering what other parts are safe to buy early on without worry having to worry about dramatic price drops?

Right now I'm keeping my eye on PSU, optical drive, CPU cooler, fans, and SSD/HDD sales. I can't see much changing within a year with those. And once I decide what socket CPU I'm going to buy, I'll be looking for motherboard sales, then RAM. Should I wait for the X99 motherboards?

My intention is to save CPU and GPU for last. I'd like to have everything ready to go for when Oculus has a release date, then go for the final two.

 

[Dangman]

In general, I don't recommend the piece by piece route unless you're completely up-to-date on computer hardware and know what parts are actually deals and what parts are just crap being sold at low prices. In which case, you wouldn't have to ask what parts to buy early on and what to buy later

With that said, if you're still going to do this, at least minimize the potential problems: Try to buy parts that you can actually test first in your current PC to make sure that they're not DOA. In addition, I would recommend getting the CPU, RAM and mobo all at the same time so that you can actually test the parts when they come in and still be within the return periods of most online stores.

I'm wondering what other parts are safe to buy early on without worry having to worry about dramatic price drops?

DVD drives and DDR3 RAM. DDR3 RAM is the biggie: That's actually increasing in price, not decreasing. In addition, X99 will be using DDR4 RAM which will be very very expensive at first. Either way, the release of DDR4 means that DDR3 pricing won't be going down. For the rest of the parts, there's always going to be fantastic random sales that makes certain parts good choices for the money or that there may be better releases for the money.

Should I wait for the X99 motherboards?

Well, what are you using the PC for?

 

[Ocean]

Other than the case, i would really wait until everything is out at once. Almost everything drops price over time, standards and available options constantly advance. Maybe the oculus will work better with one brand of videocard, maybe a new awesome killer app or game will come out that works best with 8 cores effecting your cpu cooling choices, maybe dual gpus wont work well enough altering your requirements for both case and motherboard, maybe youll need a kinect to do the coolest things.


Unless you can use it now, i would not buy it. The oculus rift launch is too far away.