Idiotic tariffs, indifferent retailers, depraved flippers and AI mania are making the simple act of buying a graphics card the defining misery of PC gaming in 2025.
I’ve been telling myself since about 2016 that I would save up to go all in and build a solid gaming desktop.
Finally, I was at the point of “Fuck it, I’m tired of waiting. I’m buying a 5080, even if it costs as much as 2 PS5s.”
I assume that whatever you’re running right now isn’t terribly new if you’ve been thinking about upgrading for nine years.
The 5080 is a 16GB card. A quick skim on Amazon suggests that 16GB Nvidia cards are in short supply, but that you can get a 16GB AMD GPU without problems.
They aren’t quite as fast on the Passmark benchmark as the 5080, but they also cost a lot less (even if the 5080 were available), and I assume that they’d be a lot faster than whatever you’re running now.
Could go with that (or something less-fancy) and then if you felt that you wanted to spend more for more performance, do so when GPUs become available.
To add a bit to the story, I did spring for a gaming laptop in 2021 because my 2013 MacBook was starting to show its age, and the model I bought came with a 2070 mobile GPU which has been fine playing newer games at modest settings at 1080p.
Laptops and prebuilts were basically the only affordable option in the pandemic, and I had a laptop need at the time. But for a while now it has still been a goal of mine to put together a good desktop. The last desktop I built was in 2010 (I snagged a GTX 580 GPU and felt like such hot shit then).
I’m so glad I built a high end computer last fall because I was lucky to afford it. Now my 4080 S used is now worth 600 dollars more than what I paid for it at MSRP.
I assume that whatever you’re running right now isn’t terribly new if you’ve been thinking about upgrading for nine years.
The 5080 is a 16GB card. A quick skim on Amazon suggests that 16GB Nvidia cards are in short supply, but that you can get a 16GB AMD GPU without problems.
https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/compare/4982vs5721vs4917/Radeon-RX-7600-XT-vs-GeForce-RTX-5080-vs-Radeon-RX-7800-XT
They aren’t quite as fast on the Passmark benchmark as the 5080, but they also cost a lot less (even if the 5080 were available), and I assume that they’d be a lot faster than whatever you’re running now.
Could go with that (or something less-fancy) and then if you felt that you wanted to spend more for more performance, do so when GPUs become available.
To add a bit to the story, I did spring for a gaming laptop in 2021 because my 2013 MacBook was starting to show its age, and the model I bought came with a 2070 mobile GPU which has been fine playing newer games at modest settings at 1080p.
Laptops and prebuilts were basically the only affordable option in the pandemic, and I had a laptop need at the time. But for a while now it has still been a goal of mine to put together a good desktop. The last desktop I built was in 2010 (I snagged a GTX 580 GPU and felt like such hot shit then).
I’m so glad I built a high end computer last fall because I was lucky to afford it. Now my 4080 S used is now worth 600 dollars more than what I paid for it at MSRP.