Why Building Between now and March is smart

A lot of people are asking me "When is the best time to build a computer for gaming?" I always tell them to build between now and March. Why? A few reasons.

1. Sales and price drops.

There is a lot of new technology coming out from the two major competitors in computer gaming: nVidia and AMD. Both of these are going to, or have, release new graphics cards in the coming months, so they are going to be dropping their "older" graphics cards by anywhere between $20 and $200, depending on the card. Also, computer retailers are going to be having their own sales, trying to get rid of some stock before Christmas and when the new GPUs are released.

2. Steam

Steam is a gaming community and retailer that will also be having a lot of sales, but I seperate it cause they aren't hardware. Computer gaming, in my opinion, would be virtually dead if it weren't for Steam, and Steam has sales on literally every week, as well as huge sales whenever there's a festive event, such as Christmas or Halloween. Steam make it very cheap to buy PC games.

3. Get your Christmas gift early

If you build now, you still have some time to get a few paychecks in before the holiday season. And again, it's very cheap to build right now because retailers are getting rid of their stock by having sales.

4. The new tech won't replace the old immediately

The R9 280X won't be replacing the Radeon 7950. In fact, they're pretty much an identical card. Nvidia's next line might replace their previous one, but they won't give you a huge performance boost. You could even go a few generations back if you wanted performance, and open yourself up for some upgradeability in the future.

5. CPUs are not the most important part

Despite what some people think, for gaming, the CPU is not the thing that makes gaming performance increase a lot. An AMD quad core is more than enough for gaming at high resolutions, and they can be picked up for $100 if you know where to look and what to look for. If you are gonna look for a cheap quad core, get an AMD 750k. Best quad core for the price.


If you are thinking of building a new computer, now is definitely a great time to do so. You could even look for barebones kits that give you good discounts.

Happy gaming, everyone.