TBG's Five-Year Retrospective on the DIY PC Market (2014-2019)

[Ari Altman]

We've put together a special retrospective article for our long-time readers, showing you all how the PC component market has changed over the past five years. Feel free to add your thoughts and reminiscences here!

[Secret]

This was a great 5 year comparison Ari.  To think that SSDs have become so affordable is amazing.  In fact storage and memory to me are the two best reasons to build your own PC as prebuilts still charge a fortune to upgrade those components.

[Ari Altman]

Glad you liked the article.

The amazing thing is that SSDs have been around this long (they were totally mainstream in 2014), and yet OEMS are still equipping their PCs with hard drives as the only storage. It's simply absurd.

[Charles4702]

I was looking at your 5 year comparison article. I would call myself a late adopter for computer hardware, but I still like building my own computers. So I have a few computers sitting around. I dont game much. Mostly I use computers to access the Internet and keep up to date and watch videos like TV Programs on HULU and other Websites. So in the recent past I did not use high end video cards.

I had some extra money so I did purchase a 4K Samsung TV. I also upgraded one computer for HDMI 2.0 which required a video card. I purchased a Gigabyte 1050TI
4GB GDDR5 video card with HDMI 2.0. for about $150.00 and It seems to work well. These newer Intel CPU's seem to last forever, so I saw no reason to upgrade my i3 6100.

However, since I had some extra money I built a couple newer computers for my TV's.

I built one computer with an i5 8400 and it works great. I put it in a corsair 200R case. The case is a little large but it has good room for cable management and supports both Hard Drives and SSD's. I put a 500 GB M.2 SATA on the motherboard.

I also thought I would build a smaller computer for fun. I purchased an Asrock Deskmini 310 STX bare bones kit. It is really small. It supports Gen 8 Intel CPU's so I put a 4 core i3 8100 in it. The Kit also comes with an external power brick and an "ac" wireless kit. So I also used 16 GB of Sodim DDR4 2400 and a Crucial 500GB SSD. I could have used a M.2 drive but I already had the SSD. The little 6" X 6" X 3" computer works well and the wireless worked well too.

My oldest computer is an i5 2500K system that still runs well enough. I am going to look for a good home for some of my older computers.

Peace Out

[Ari Altman]

I was looking at your 5 year comparison article. I would call myself a late adopter for computer hardware, but I still like building my own computers. So I have a few computers sitting around. I dont game much. Mostly I use computers to access the Internet and keep up to date and watch videos like TV Programs on HULU and other Websites. So in the recent past I did not use high end video cards.

I had some extra money so I did purchase a 4K Samsung TV. I also upgraded one computer for HDMI 2.0 which required a video card. I purchased a Gigabyte 1050TI
4GB GDDR5 video card with HDMI 2.0. for about $150.00 and It seems to work well. These newer Intel CPU's seem to last forever, so I saw no reason to upgrade my i3 6100.

However, since I had some extra money I built a couple newer computers for my TV's.

I built one computer with an i5 8400 and it works great. I put it in a corsair 200R case. The case is a little large but it has good room for cable management and supports both Hard Drives and SSD's. I put a 500 GB M.2 SATA on the motherboard.

I also thought I would build a smaller computer for fun. I purchased an Asrock Deskmini 310 STX bare bones kit. It is really small. It supports Gen 8 Intel CPU's so I put a 4 core i3 8100 in it. The Kit also comes with an external power brick and an "ac" wireless kit. So I also used 16 GB of Sodim DDR4 2400 and a Crucial 500GB SSD. I could have used a M.2 drive but I already had the SSD. The little 6" X 6" X 3" computer works well and the wireless worked well too.

My oldest computer is an i5 2500K system that still runs well enough. I am going to look for a good home for some of my older computers.

Peace Out

Those all sound like very nice systems, Charles4702! You are right that the Core i3-6100 is still very serviceable. You might find TBG's recent review of the AMD Athlon 200GE interesting, as it includes benchmarks for the Core i3-6100.

Funny that you still have a 2500K running - that too is my oldest CPU, and it was definitely a game-changer at the time it was released in 2011.