Worst time to buy a PC

Since my old AMD starts to make more and more problems I decided that I want to get a new PC at the end of this year.
Unfortunatly a few weeks ago, I made the big mistake to check what my options might be. Now I got infected by a serious illness called "impatience".

I belong to the people which relative easily understand how hardware works and what fits together.
But I also belong to the people which actually dont care about such stuff until I really need it.
So the last time I updated my knowledge about hardware was roughly 5 years ago Dont worry... Im up to date again.

What I had in mind was getting a gaming PC that would carry me through the modern games of the next few years.
Very soon I realized that so-called gaming PCs start at 500€ and end at roundabout 30.000€. That of course limits the choices a bit.
Since my money printer died early this year I decided that 1500,-€ isnt a bad limit to set.
I also headed away from the "lets buy a PC" concept because you only get overpriced crap in online shops, amazon or ebay.

Really when you check pre-made PCs and take a close look at the components you very soon have to realize that based on the price of the PC the components are pure crap.
I consider it a crime when manufacturers sell a i7-7700k on a B250 or H270 mainboard with 2133MHz Ram. When I have a K CPU then I of course need a Z Mainboard, Period! And when the CPU supports ram up to 2400MHz then I dont put anything slower into the PC.
Overall I would say that all pre-made PCs I have seen are 300,- to 1000,-€ overpriced when taking a close look at the components.

Conclusion: I pick the components that I want and build my own PC for 1500,-€.

The configuration below might change due recent events (explanation follows).

Lets start with the CPU.
I went for a I7-7700k because its relative new (early 2017) and offers a good overclocking support. Of course I would WOF (WithOut Fan) and not a crappy TRAY version due to security reasons. Costs a bit more but I dont risk getting a crappy build CPU.
4x4.2 Ghz base clock + 4.5GHz default Turbo clock (plus whatever the cooling can squeeze out of the CPU)
Of course there are Ryzen CPUs which are also not bad but they focus more on high core counts instead of high clock speeds which currently are more important for gaming.

As already mentioned a K CPU requires a Z board and the options of available Z270 mainboards is incredible high and choosing one is the most difficult task of all.
I came to the conclusion that I want multi-GPU support (for later upgrades) -> SLI + Crossfire.
Fast M.2 Slots have to be on the boards and I require a board which supports RAM with clock speeds beyond 3200Mhz (higher than that is possible but is relative ineffective).
USB 3.1 Gen2 also would be cool
That limits the choices to somewhat more than 20 boards from different manufacturers.
To reduce the list I removed all boards that in my eyes were too expensive and compared the remaining ones in detail.
In the end I still have 5-6 boards on my list and their specs are pretty much the same, just the look and a few minor unimportant details are a bit different.
I rolled a dice and currently the choice is the "MSI Z270 Gaming Pro Carbon". Yes that truely is the best way to select hardware without going crazy.
(since the prices go up and down daily i also might pick another board)

I mentioned the RAM earlier.
I went for the "16GB G.Skill RipJaws V schwarz DDR4-3200". This is a dual kit (which is faster than a single kit) and yes I am aware that everything above the 2400MHz that the CPU supports would mean overclocking. Thats no big deal.
I currently have two versions of these RAM in consideration.
The somewhat more expensive (15€ more) has higher response times -> CL16-16-16-38 while the other has CL16-18-18-38. To be honest I doubt that this makes much of a difference at all.
Why the RipJaws?
Well, because they are pretty good, have a nice heatsink but are not too high. If the Ram would be too high I might get problems with CPU Cooler.

Oh, yeah... the CPU Cooler most likely is going to be a "Thermalright Le Grand Macho RT"
I know that there are also other very good coolers out there, some which are even better. The problem as usual are the price and the dimensions of these coolers. Some cost you are fortune and some simply dont fit into case or conflict with the RAM.
The Le Grand Macho RT is also very big, i mean, its a monster but it has a asymetric shape which prevents that RAM or Graphic card get blocked.
I also think that I could put a 2nd CPU Fan onto it in a push-pull configuration to improve the cooling even more (if required).

Since the chosen mainboard has 2xM.2 slots I also would love to use them.
A good gaming PC needs a good SSD.
"250GB Samsung 960 Evo M.2 2280 NVMe PCIe" is pretty much the fasted SSD on a M.2 slot you can get. In theory its up to 6 times faster than an ordinary SSD connected via SATA cable.
There is simply not alternative to this.
In my current PC I also have a SSD mounted which will also be used in the new PC. The fast EVO 960 will be my system drive and my old SSD will be used for gaming. This way I have a ultra fast Windows and also improve the lifetime of both SSDs.
Next to these SSDs I currently also have 3x 3.5" HDDs in my current PC which of course will find their way into the new PC and one external HDD which I intend to connect via USB 3.0 or 3.1.

When talking about the CPU cooler I wrote something about dimensions and space problems in the case.
Thats really a problem.
The thing is that Ive been browsing through hundreds of PC cases in order to find one which is not too expensive but also not a primitive piece of junk with practically no air flow.
I was looking for a very specific setup here.
2x 5.25" slots OR 1x5,25" + 1x3,5" slot (because I want to mount a CD drive and a card reader from my old PC)
ATX form factor
A PSU tunnel at the bottom of the case.
At least 3 internal slots for 3.5" drives + at least two internal slots for 2.5" drives.
At least 2 case fans on the front panel and if possible 5 or 6 fans in total. If possible with at least 3 fans installed by default (because extra fans cost extra money).
And very important, I didnt want any HDD cages or HDD mounts right infront of the front fans because that would disturb the air flow inside the case and it also wouldnt allow to put in long graphic cards.
Cable management would also be nice and it would be absolutely great if the case is wide enough to support the chosen CPU cooler.
As you can see I was looking for the impossible and found it.
The Sharkoon S25-W, a relative big case with window (which is a nice bonus) where in theory everything I so far have selected would fit in. With 45,-€ for the case its almost perfect. I mean most premium cases dont even offer all these features and the design of that sharkoon case is pretty clever. HDDs fit behind the PSU inside the tunnel and get cooled by intake slots on the tunnel, SSDs can be either mounted directly on the tunnel or behind the cable management, there is nothing that disturbs the airflow, I can mount extra fans on the top, it has magnetic dust filters and I can fit all my drives into it. It even has an extra frame for my 3.5" card reader.
Finding the right case wasnt easy.

Ok, whats missing?
A Graphic card.
The budget for a GTX 1080 TI would have been a bit tight, so I decided to just to take a Zotac GTX 1080 AMP! Extreme. This card is 10% faster than many other GTX 1080 cards and therefore is half on the way to a TI card, with difference that it costs 150,- less than a TI.
I think that card would be enough for me at the moment and allow me to play AAA games at ultra resolution for the next few years.
And when I need more graphic power in a few years I still could buy a 2nd GTX 1080 (which is cheaper then) and run both in a SLI configuration -> remember I have a mainboard with SLI support (I try to consider every option)

Last but not least. The Power Suply.
I currently have a not that old Be Quiet! L8 600 Watt PSU.
Here I am not 100% sure.
I did multiple power calculations to see if I can run that PC with 600 Watt because well, the L8 is actually not bad.
My own calculation told me directly that I can run this PC with my old 600 Watt PSU but only if I dont put in my old HDDs. Yeah, HDDs draw some power. Mechanical parts require maybe 15 Watt.
The Be Quiet! power calculator told me that I actually could use the old PSU but I am very close to the point where the PSU starts operating not so effective anymore.
So I decided to put a "700 Watt be quiet! Pure Power 10 Non-Modular" on my wishlist.
Additional costs but its better than having the CPU or GPU to throttle down.

Ok - That are the 8 components required to build this PC and my calculation showed that it can be done with 1500,-€ (1480,- to be exact).
You of course can get cheaper gaming PCs but not with this specific selection of components. My selection of parts is high quality at reasonable prices.
A few optimizations are always possible but well... I was planning to wait a few weeks because... ... ... Worst time to buy a PC.

Worst time because just a few week Intel announced the release of the 8th Generation of their mainstream CPUs.
Unlike the i7-7700k the Coffee Lake version i7-8700k that is supposed to get released on 5th October is not a quad core CPU but a hexacore CPU with 12 Threads.
So it would not only be a CPU worth for gaming. It would also be able to more and faster calculations in tools which demand high processing power.
The announcement of this new CPU series was about 3 weeks ago and pretty much every day new details get leaked.

While I love to use my new PC has gaming machine I am used to work with it. I process large amount of data and compile lots of stuff. All that "work" would of course go better with a 6 core CPU. The leaked benchmarks look pretty good since the I7-8700k has about the same singlecore performance as the I7-7700k that I selected above. So its still a good gaming machine. The multicore performance however is up to 50% better due to the two additional cores and beats even some of the Ryzen PCs.

Now the problem is this new CPU will be released in October and I have no idea how long it will take before it is available.
Next problem is that yesterday leaks appeared showing this new CPU up to 100€ more expensive then my initial choice, the I7-7700k.
And this new CPU requires a different mainboard generation.

To be honest I was expecting this new CPU to be maybe 30-50€ more expensive, which would be perfectly fine for a new generation of CPUs.
However additionally to that are the costs for the mainboards. Eventhough the new z370 mainboards are pretty much identical with the z270 boards that i have selected above I still expect that they will be more expensive since they are newer and companies love making additional profits.
The only difference between z270 and z370 is a different chipset. Actually price increases are not justified but I think they happen anyways.

Is it worth to wait for the Coffee Lake CPUs?
Is it maybe better to use the old Kaby Lake CPUs because they are cheaper?
I dont know.
The problem is that my calculation above contains limited time cashback promotions, so I have to make a decision before Coffee Lake gets released and then live with the consequences.
Worst time to buy a PC.

yes thats normal, as soon you buy something its old already

however, I think that Intel currently is doing alot of crap.
Instead offering the CPUs at a price where they can compete with Ryzen they release them overly expensive again.
And they do that eventhough they practically messed up the release of this new generation of CPU by having not even the correct mainboards ready to support them.

Coffee Lake CPUs get released in October.
Because the series 300 mainboards are not ready by then they re-release old series 200 mainboards just with an updated chipset.
So the customers actually have to buy something that soon is outdated in order to use the new CPUs.
In January 2018 the 300 series mainboards will be released which makes the in October 2017 released z370 mainboards obsolete. So Intel tells the customers to buy mainboards now and buy new mainboards again just 4 months later.
Unless of course you take a K CPU because it will take an entire year until Intel is willing/able to release the Z390 which will be the first series 300 boards that can be overclocked.

So normal users can buy old (refreshed) hardware which practically is outdated within 4 months. And overclockers are left hanging mid-air until late 2018 until they can get their proper series 300 boards for overclocking.
Most likly until then Intel will introduce the 9th generation of CPUs or something like that, which makes everything just released obsolete again within month.

But actually I am atm just confused and a bit pissed at the price situation with the new CPUs.
Intel has to compete with AMD but for some reason they think its fine to drive the price upwards for a product that is just slightly better than whats already on the market.
Maybe not even better.
In terms of singlecore performance the i7-7700k still might be better and in term of multicore performance Ryzen has taken the lead.
At best the new Coffee Lake CPU is an allrounder that doesnt suck anywhere.

I get your point and I am actually not that far away from it.
Ive spend a good amount of time to select the best for my money and my goal is to build something thats somewhat future proof (which of course is a bit unrealistic).
I dont really want to start upgrading again in a year. I want to invest into something good now (without spending money for stuff that turns out to be not required).
And if I eventually intend to do upgrades I want my hardware as compatible as possible. This is why I decided not to go for the cheapest meanboard on the market and instead took one with SLI support and USB3.1 Gen2.
Especially the key components in my eyes should be high quality and if possible future proof considering possible upgrades.

I could have taken even faster RAM... but performance gain above 3200MHz and 16CL is minimal.
As you said for gaming the graphic card should be the most expensive component and I think with the zotac I have a card that easily could use a good amount of time without any requirement to upgrade.

I got my last PC about 5 years ago. A FX series AMD with 8 cores.
I am hugely disappointed by this machine because the FX series was a huge design failure. Back then I didnt know, I was blinded a bit by having 8 cores.
Today AMD Ryzen of course is a different story. Especially the fact that Ryzen is based on AM4 and AMD will keep this socket as standard at least until 2020. Even if current AMD CPU are not as fast as Intel CPUs, you still have the chance to simply replace the CPU while keeping the rest of your PC. Thats a good point for AMD.
Btw. if you have AM3+ then you need a new board for Ryzen.

I might invest a bit more on my Intel setup now.
But I believe that selected it in a way that would allow me to use it for at least 4-5 years without running into performance problems and probably also without any big upgrades.
That being considered the PC isnt actually that expensive.
I actually believe that we are living in a time where the hardware demand has slowed down. Lets face it the PC performance isnt doubling every 18 months anymore. Instead Software gets more effective. For gaming new APIs got released. Vulcan and DX12 which run alot better than older versions. Todays games just have started to make use of these improved APIs and I think the need to upgrade Hardware will slow down to this even further.
(unless of course you play Civilization -> I have the feeling that the version number actually is a multiplier for the turn calculation time)

Well, I think I have to wait 2 weeks and see if more information about Coffee lake appears.
If the price difference isnt that big I might even consider getting the new CPU... but depends on how true the leaks are and under which conditions the z370 boards get released.

Even worse than building a 1500€ PC is buying a complete PC system.
For a PC with the same components you easily have to pay 2000-2500€ if not more. And that if you even find a PC system with such components.
I even looked at vendors and every high-end PC there (unless ultra expensive ones) have some components I never would buy because they limit the other high-end components.

Very often they put in cheap mainboards which limit the performance. Or they use slow ram... or high-end CPUs and graphic cards combined with cheap coolers.
It does not help much to have a fast CPU which throttles down because it is overheating.
It also doesnt help when they put RAM into the PC which isnt certified with the mainboard. You would never get such RAM to use correct clock speeds.
I believe the problem with the RAM is even worse on Ryzen PCs than on Intel.

You even get to see PC systems just with normal HDD instead of SSD. Even the worst SSD would boost the performance massively.

May I ask, why do you need that much RAM?

Latest articles about the new Intel CPU tell that it appears that the mainboard manufacturers havent managed to optimize their boards and bios to operate correctly with the new i7-8700k.
It is most likely that the leaked benchmarks are based on the CPUs base clock speed only, while the comparisons with the I7-7700k have been done so far at Turbo clock speed @ 4,5Ghz.
Thats pretty interesting because it means that the new CPU is running at only 3.8Ghz and is as fast as the old CPU running at 4,5Ghz. And the turbo clock speed of the new CPU should reach 4,7Ghz in single core mode.
If true then this new the performance should improve even more when the Bios upgrades are available.

You are probably right with the power consumption.
When I did the calculation on the Be quiet calculator last time I got other values for some reason but maybe I really calculated with 2 GPUs.
The Zotac card consumes a bit more power than other gtx 1080. It reaches up to 270 W.
So when considering 5 SATA, Overclocking, 2 Ram, upto 6 fans I would get up to 500W. With a 600W PSU thats about 83% load.
The l8 has 88% efficiency (a bit lower than the newer PSUs -> 92%) but that should be fine. I dont think that all parts of the system will ever run at full load anyways. The peak performance of the 600w PSU is listed at 650w.
So, yes it might be a good idea not to invest into a new PSU and save a bit money here.

When/If I ever consider putting a 2nd Graphic card into the system I still can get a new PSU later and if I decide against it I saved 75€.
Thats probably exactly the money I need for a different CPU (if i go for that).

Regarding the X-series (kaby lake), well... the boards are alot more expensive than the Z270 boards plus Ive read alot of negative stuff about crap power management on these boards and overheating.
The mesh bus structure in test has lead to microstuttering but I assume thats something they sooner or later will fix via software. However, I believe that the specifications of the new coffee lake mentioned that they also dont use the old ring bus anymore.

Are you sure that the titan xp is slower than a gtx 1080?
UserBenchmark: Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti vs Titan Xp

Personally I wouldnt go higher than 3200MHz on the ram because the performance gain above that is minimal because response times and latencies increase with higher clock speeds.
When you have 4266MHz and have to run them 19-19-19-39 its probably still better (and of course more cost efficient) to run at 3200Mhz with 16-16-16-36 or even at CL14 rates.
Next to that do you need to take care of the mainboard. Most mainboards dont even support more than 3800Mhz... some even less (even the Z boards). And then you have to check for compatibility of RAM and mainboard.
Just because the RAM could in theory run at such clock speeds does not mean that it will run at such speeds. Afterall everything above 2400/2666Mhz is overclocking and therefore not guaranteed.

Also worth to be considered is that while the TridenZ and the Ripjaws V are actually pretty much the same RAM, the TridentZ has a slightly higher heatsink design and might not fit with every CPU cooler (the TridentZ are 2mm higher).
And yes, really... I am thinking about 2mm details