I think the category you’re looking for is premium games. On mobile it appears to mean that the game is complete and not sold in pieces.

So a faster CPU might improve performance in Act 3 of BG3? Sign me up! It did indeed seem like a CPU issue since there was no stuttering or frame drops, but characters just standing around thinking long and hard about their turns during combat. Partial towards that upgrade since the 2600x is fine for most cases and this specific issue is likely to be patched by devs.

I'm leaning towards AMD mainly because I have had no bad experiences with dealing with their drivers on Linux and because their mid-range cards actually have more VRAM than the card from 2017 that I'm trying to replace. My RM650x should be fine driving a RX 6700xt or even a 6800xt, so neither should be too power hungry for this setup.

Those are all fair considerations. My free time outside of work mostly consists of some housework, dog-related activities, and gaming. I honestly doubt it's going to change much until we can afford to finally buy a house, and children are out of the question for us. Even when the house-buying day comes it'll probably only be a brief disruption to our normal schedules for a few months before we settle back into the routine. Of course with the extras that come with keeping a house in a livable condition.

What did you replace the 1070 with? Are you planning a full platform change or just a beefier CPU in the AM4 for your next upgrade?

I built it about 4.5 years ago now. I'd say with the amount of use I've gotten out of it that it's definitely provided value, not exclusively as a gaming platform. If I didn't care much about demanding gaming, high graphics settings, and FPS I'd probably just keep it as it is now for another 4-5 years. There's not really much wrong with it and it does run Terraria.

Parts are currently on sale which is why I'm considering this upgrade only now, unless I'm being bamboozled by the online store. Gotta cross-check with historic prices and other stores first.

Yeah, cheers! I feel that, this 580 has been serving for way longer than I expected it to when I first bought it. Had some issues with crashing first couple of days after getting Baldur's Gate 3, but it hasn't crashed since I replaced the thermal paste couple of weeks ago. I guess it was a perfect storm of dried up thermal paste, brand new game, and ungodly high temperatures here with no AC.

My bios is probably ways out of date since I typically only flash it when I need a fix or a feature such as in this case. Thanks for the heads up!

I'm honestly not sure where I was going with this post. Perhaps probing to find out if I'm choosing a cost-effective upgrade. Appreciate the comments though!

Yeah, I feel like I haven't rushed the upgrades too soon with the GPU. It has been almost impossible to get one at a normal price these past three years though.

Some spending is flowing over the top of the spending dam, but I don't think it's about to give structurally. We're also spending a bit on vacation around this same time, it feels worse to spend a lot at once but honestly it doesn't make a difference if we spend it now or spread out as long as it's isn't a pattern.

You're making a fine mess out of talking me out of this. Haha, cheers!

Yeah, not a problem really. Just saving kind of aggressively for a down payment for a house.

Or perhaps I’m going about this all wrong and I should instead spend half of that budget on repairing my PS5 and the other half on continuously buying new controllers after they get stick drift.

How is this going to affect battery life? Some of us don’t have the switch connected to power 24/7. Sounds like a bad idea for an underpowered handheld device.

For phones 5+ years of updates is good compared to the alternatives, and is why I have one. For a computer, on the other hand, it’s just not very impressive. Perhaps FairPhones come close (don’t know how long their software is supported but their selling point is longevity), but their specs aren’t that impressive. On the flip side you get something repairable.

MacBooks are often built better with higher quality materials than many other laptops, but it is essentially a computer. Most computers that have high enough specs will always run the latest version of most Linux distributions or Windows barring any need for weird drivers from the past century. Feels a little iffy to have a perfectly good computer that won’t update software anymore just because. Up until recently you could just install some Linux OS on your old MacBooks when it went out of support but honestly I don’t know whether you can still do that after they started making non-x86 stuff.

With all that said, haven’t seen many laptops physically outlive MacBooks’ updates. With the exception of some ThinkPads and possibly some XPS models. Plastic laptops with plastic hinges tend to struggle keeping up, especially if the display is on the larger side. A large gaming laptop living the life of a typical MacBook, going to cafes and university in a backpack every day is probably gonna have more stress on hinges etc.

As for HP I have only heard bad stuff about them for the last 10 years or so. Don’t think I’ll buy stuff from them due to their evil printers that won’t scan without ink etc.

Not many specific recommendations here but just some observations I have made. Hope it’s helpful.