Black Friday

I am thankful for all I have, but what I've really been waiting for is Black Friday.

I'm a PC gaming enthusiast. Over the last year, my 2+-year-old Alienware M14x laptop has been losing relevancy as a PC gaming machine. Today I finally made the leap from PC gaming laptops to PC gaming desktops. I secured a good deal on an iBUYPOWER desktop from NewEgg.

This new gaming desktop should stay relevant for years to come. No, it's not future proofed. Future proofing, spending a top dollar now to stay relevant for as long as possible, is a common mistake made by newcomers to PC gaming. Rather than future proof, what you should aim for is maximize the ratio of performance versus price. Then slowly over time, as any component becomes obsolete, replace it with a current high-value component. On this machine, I chose an AMD FX-8320 CPU and a 2GB NVIDIA GTX 750 GPU.

Here is a link to a site listing CPU value: CPUBenchmark.net. And a link to a site listing GPU value: VideoCardBenchmark.net. These two pages are dynamic and will change over time. But as of this writing, my choices for these two components (CPU and GPU) were very near the top of both pages even though each only cost around $100.