Upgrading on 3 year old hardware

[suffer1034]

I'm very skeptical about the statement I hear from a lot of people which is, "Build your own system, so you can upgrade it later on." Say I build my own budget gaming system, following one of Marest's builds at $600-800.

Q1: Am I really going to get considerably more mileage 2-3 years down the road by tossing in an upgrade?

Q2: What components would I need to upgrade in 2-3 years to be able to play some new games?

Q3: Ever changing hardware compatibility seem like it could make upgrading a major pain, such that you have to almost replace everything. What type of hardware do I need to purchase now that will give me the best chance of being able to upgrade later on and what should I completely avoid?

Thanks all.

[vesseblah]

Q1: Am I really going to get considerably more mileage 2-3 years down the road by tossing in an upgrade?
Q2: What components would I need to upgrade in 2-3 years to be able to play some new games?

If things advance at the same pace as for last decade, for dumb 3D shooters you could easily use the $800 computer 2-3 years from now with just throwing in new graphics card. Motherboard+CPU+RAM are high end (not top of the line) by today's standards so those should be still totally viable but probably not possible to upgrade any single part besides graphics card.

Q3: Ever changing hardware compatibility seem like it could make upgrading a major pain, such that you have to almost replace everything. What type of hardware do I need to purchase now that will give me the best chance of being able to upgrade later on and what should I completely avoid?

Best thing you can invest now is decent sized SSD (250GB), high quality 850W PSU and a versatile case, probably everything else will be worthless in 3-4 years when you're looking into making major upgrades or full rebuild. Wiht those three parts you can save up to $3-400 from your next computer. Both the case and the PSU are usually custom-made and very hard to replace on big brand computer such as Dell or HP as those do not use off the shelf parts making those the biggest problems when buying a supermarket computer.

Besides the case and the PSU I really can't promise than anything else stays relevant for three years and is worth investing on. Intel will come up with one, possibly two new CPU generations with incompatible socket, DDR3 RAM is getting replaced by DDR4 probably starting in 2013, HDDs are replaced by SSDs and so on. Graphics card is on the fence. If you'd buy a $500 graphics card today it could be worth maybe $150 in three years losing whole lot of it's value but still usable at medium or higher settings, but $150 card bought today will be worthless in three years.