Gadgetory

if you're one of those PC builders who agonizes over every component you select to make sure that everything you have is the latest and the greatest it can be really frustrating when you hear about a new product release a couple months later kind of like when Apple announces some incremental update at a press event right after you finally bought the did I thing to your so you feel like part of the in-crowd well technology does indeed move very quickly so many people wonder if trying to future-proof their pcs is a good idea to try to stay ahead of the curve I mean when you think about it the future is going to happen at some point so in that sense future proofing makes about as much sense as trying to death proof your body or tax proof your income but does it really extend the lifespan of your PC and by how long to answer that question let's take a look at some strategies that people who try to future-proof their PCs use many are interested in being early adopters of a just-released platform that supports something like a new type of memory others might invest in a super beefy power supply for example under motherboard with lots of expansion slots for a future multi GPU setup or a type of expansion card that doesn't exist today the idea seems to make sense on the surface put together the most powerful thing that you can to keep it from being hopelessly out of date in a few years but is that really the best way to go what we usually recommend instead of buying the most high-end ball or stuff out there because you want to future-proof your computer is to get the best stuff that you can afford that represent a good price to performance ratio today without blowing the entire budget but why here are some examples of why our philosophy is to be more concerned about value for the money than future proofing let's start with your builds CUDA grass the graphics card well GP technology tends to advance pretty quickly so unless a new architecture that promises significantly higher performance is right around the corner it makes more sense to buy the best thing you can afford comfortably now and only prepare for SLI or crossfire with a pricier power supply if you know that you'll be able to afford a second card soon after and actually have the monitor set up to take advantage of it otherwise you might end up like a lot of people who dropped a bunch of money on an expensive power supply and more expensive motherboard but never ended up adding a second graphics card after all because you probably won't be buying a second graphics card that's identical to what you have two years down the road unless you're comfortable buying something used anyway which if you're the sort of bleeding edge type person doesn't really fit into your customer profile to think about that but how about your CPU let's suppose you want to somehow make sure that your CPU will trade punches with whatever comes out in three or four years well the nice thing is that processors these days are generally very efficient so as long as you're buying a mid or an upper tier CPU like an unlocked k processor from Intel you'll have a chip that will probably last you for a few years anyway regardless of whether you're actively thinking about future proofing and since CPU sockets change quite frequently it is highly likely that you would end up locked into whatever processor architecture you're buying or at best the next one coming making your future proofing of your motherboard and CPU pretty pointless it's also worth thinking about whether trying to future-proof your PC with the newest stuff will result in a real-world performance boost for example faster memory speeds or PCI Express speeds look good on paper but often result in little to zero performance gain in the real world which you can learn more about here and by the time games or other programs mature to the point where they might be able to take advantage of it she'll probably be wanting to upgrade a a lot of your other components anyway really high-end Ram with the absolute fastest speeds also typically comes at a hefty price premium making it a galactic waste of money for most people the point here is that instead of worrying too much about how viable your rig will be in a few years compared to what everyone else is building at that time instead focus on having a reasonable upgrade path for a system you can afford today for example I would spend the extra six dollars or whatever it is on a motherboard that has a couple of extra RAM flaws because memory upgrades are something that are likely to occur over the lifespan of a computer and another thing for example if you're a person who tends to eat through hard drive space maybe make sure that you buy a case that has a quite a few well-placed drive slots that are easy to get at so that your future expansion will be relatively easy the thing I don't recommend is spending a fortune on something that's marginally better when you could have just pocketed the money waited a couple years for Moore's law to continue its onward death march and get something equivalent or better than what you would have been able to afford with the money that you saved effectively getting what you did get and what you're able to get later for the same amount of money because the cold hard truth of it is there's pretty much nothing that you can do to future-proof a computer and often the better value a to go about it is to actually trade in or sell your old parts every two or three years and upgrade that way if you want to stay on the bleeding edge speaking of keeping up with things fresh books fresh books is the cloud-based accounting solution that allows small business owners to save time destress off' i their lives and get more organized it allows you to craft and send professional invoices in seconds lets you track your hours lets you keep track of your expenses it basically does all that boring accounting stuff for you so that you can spend your time developing your business whatever your business is if it's small-time computer repair or you you know run a mechanic shop or you paint houses for example FreshBooks even supports taking deposits for your work ahead of time fresh books is going to make it so that you don't have to go home at the end of a frankly very tiring very busy day and stare at your accounting software and kind of go hoc how much does that how much should I quote that customer all that stupid stuff no forget it try fresh books for free for 30 days by going to fresh books calm forward slash tech quickie which is linked in the video description entering tech quickie and how did you hear about us section and start getting yourself organized saving your time and looking more professional while you do it not just looking also be so thanks for watching guys if you like this video like it if you dislike to dislike it if you want to check out our other channels book me bak check them out here if you want to leave a 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