How Can You Future-Proof Your Gaming Rig In Order To Play Upcoming AAA Titles?

PC gaming goes through so many hardware refreshes throughout the year. Every single year new GPUs and Processors are announced. For a newcomer, it can get confusing sifting through all of them. Because of the frequent hardware refreshes, it might seem a bit intimidating to people that their current PC won’t be able to run upcoming titles. Perhaps you’re someone who already knows this and have put together a fine rig for yourself. But you are still worried about your gaming PC being underpowered down the line. So should you just go and shell out more money for upgrades? Or should you wait a bit for new hardware refreshes? We’ll be answering both of those questions in this guide. What Is Future-Proofing Honestly, future-proofing is a word that is thrown around way too much these days. For the newbies, future-proofing in PC gaming basically means putting together a rig that will perform well for years to come. Sadly, that’s very difficult to achieve in a world where even incremental GPU upgrades have a significant increase in performance. But if you absolutely must “future-proof” your build, how should you go about it? What Should You Upgrade? If you absolutely must run nearly every AAA game that comes out for a while, you obviously need decent specs. But how should you upgrade your rig so that it stays strong for some time? Power Supply Well, let’s start off with things you actually shouldn’t upgrade. If you are putting together a new rig, buy a good PSU with proper certification. You’ll even want to have 100-150 watts of extra power so you can keep it around when you eventually upgrade. Just don’t spend too much on it or take the budget out from other parts. Processor Let’s move on to the processor. Honestly, processor improvements are really slow on both sides, whether it be AMD or Intel. Now, that might not be exactly true with 3rd gen Ryzen, but most likely the next version will be a small incremental upgrade. So unless your current processor is absolutely bottle-necking your GPU, it should still be good to go. Well, assuming it’s a mid-range CPU. And if you’re putting together a new rig, just look for the best price/performance ratio and don’t worry about future-proofing in this area. Motherboard Sure you don’t want to skimp out on a motherboard since everything depends on it. But you don’t want to spend too much either. Here’s what we mean by that. If you skimp out on the motherboard and plan to upgrade the processor down the line, you won’t be able to because of the VRM limitations or poor power efficiency. On the other hand, if you spend too much, well quite frankly it’s stupid. Spending up to $250 - $300 on a motherboard doesn’t make sense for most people. It’s definitely not future proof because sockets change all the time and it’s not reasonable if you skimp out on the GPU because of this. Graphics Card Well, this one should be pretty obvious. Upgrading your GPU is a sure-fire way to make sure the rig stays future-proof for a while. But remember, games are advancing pretty quickly, so it's unlikely that a GPU from today will still keep up 3-4 year later. Whether you are putting together a new rig or upgrading your old one, do not spend more than your budget allows. You will ultimately regret this down the line. You might get the highest-end GPU right now like these best RTX 2080 variants, but it will definitely lose its value quickly. That’s the key issue here, value and how much you are willing to shell out. Final Thoughts Long story short, future-proofing your PC definitely isn’t easy. Our only recommendation is just don’t think by building balls to the walls rig you’ll be set for years to come. We don’t know how the games will look and run in the near future, so definitely keep this in mind. If you want to upgrade and future-proof your current rig, just do it in the right areas as we mentioned above. More often than not, it's better to play the waiting game and look for a better value than what you have now. If you need more details or any information about technologies and gaming gears, PCGuide has guides and information to keep you up to date at all time.