“When Dell made this tower, Gordon Brown was prime minister and Bitcoin was a day old”

@userfriendlypc

At the end of 2020, Nvidia and AMD unleashed some exquisite hardware. Nvidia’s RTX 3000 range of GPUs brought unthinkable levels of performance into the home, while AMD launched the third iteration of Ryzen in under 18 months. For system builders and upgraders, this is the moment we live for. The prospect of balancing budgets and technology to create machines that deliver the latest wizardry into people’s homes.

Well, that is what’s meant to happen: instead, last December, a chronic shortage of components scuppered Christmas retail for me and other system builders. The shelves had been cleared of certain CPUs and you had more chance of receiving a written apology from Donald Trump than getting your hands on these products. Once the low volumes of new GPUs vanished, the previous generations followed until the only option most wholesalers had available was an Nvidia GT 720. Although the design of this card echoes back to 2014, it can still throw an Excel sheet around, but anything other than basic gaming is beyond