Good time to buy?

[frozenlead]

Several of my friends and I will be building all new machines soon (I'll post a big long marathon for you all here!). So far, our price bracket is $1500. No hardware is picked out yet (aside from cases and such), since it'd be a little silly to do so. Our timeline though, needs some help. What do you guys think will be the best time to buy in the future? It would be most convienent for all of us to build at the beginning of next summer. I know the next gen GPUs will be out around Q4 this year, which brings the next-next gen out right around the beginning of summertime - but I don't really know about the CPU timeline. Has anyone heard about the newest CPUs? Do you think our timeline is a good one? We'd like our hardware to be new, but broken in, so the prices aren't that steep. Opinions? Comments?

Thanks.

 

[foolycooly]

Well if you want hardware to be new and broken in, the cutting edge hardware is not what you'll be looking for. It's very difficult to forecast that far into the future even if we hear announcements from AMD/Intel/Nvidia regarding their upcoming new technology. I would imagine the i7 chipset will be the sweetspot in terms of value by then, with new more powerful processors taking the high end market. DX11 should be available by then, as well as windows 7. In short, it's hard to say IMO.

 

[Shnur]

Wait and see
I guess soon enough we'll see Larrabee which will definitely change part of how we see our computers (in a bad or good way). After there's movement to 32nm for Intel and AMD coming up. Graphic cards right now are mostly just rebranded/tweaked so there's not much innovation here. You're also missing DX11 support.
Wait.

 

[winterblade]

IMHO even if by the end of summer new CPU's and GPU's come out, they will be top end componets, and while I undestand that that is just the point, with a $1500 budget, you'll end up with a core i7 and 2 top tier radeon 4000 or geforce gtx 200.

In the end I have to agree with FoolyCooly, it is hard to say what will the future deliver to us, it is my opinion that the best moment to buy a new computer is as soon as you need one, there's just no point waiting, there will always be something better than what you just get a month (or less) after you bought it.

 

[meatwad53186]

IMO, no matter what, there's never a "good" time to buy that one can foresee. No matter how long you wait to buy, there will always be something that will be just announced/released that you could possibly feel the need to wait for, so there really is never a "good" time to buy other than two weeks from now might be a better time to buy than right now because Product X will be on sale/drop in price. So basically, there really is no best time to buy, you just need to make the plunge when you feel that you'll be satisfied with your build.