Hardware you shouldn’t buy this Christmas

Its Christmas time once again, and you all know what that means. Bonuses are being paid, shops are putting up “great specials”, and you’re probably in the market for some presents (either for yourself or for others).

This time of year also sees a bunch of AAA titles released, which means you’ve either got a new range of games to play, or you will have come December 25th.

That also probably means you’ll want to upgrade some hardware in your PC – which is good. Just avoid the following components:

Hard Drives

After the recent flooding in Thailand which has affected component production, hard drive pricing has spiked all over the world. South Africa is no different, and a 500GB drive now costs more than a 2TB did at the end of September.

The component shortage is likely to affect pricing until at least the second quarter of 2012, so if you were thinking of adding more storage to your HTPC; stop it.

 

Nvidia GTX560

While the GTX560 is an impressive mid-range graphics card which offers good performance for the price, Nvidia have recently released a GTX560 448-core limited edition GPU.

The 448-core edition isn’t meant to replace the GTX560, but rather offer higher performance at a slightly higher price point. Based off the GTX570 platform, the GTX560 448-core edition will be a great mid-range card for those who want impressive performance to last them for a year or two, and can’t quite stretch to the GTX570.

No word on when these GPUs will be hitting SA shores though, so you may want to put that GPU upgrade off for a short while longer.

Sandy Bridge

P67/Z68 motherboards and Intel Core i 2xxx processors offer some of the best performance for the price and are a great buy – or at least were.

With the recent release of the X79 motherboards and accompanying chips, Sandy Bridge no longer holds the performance crown in the market.

If you can’t afford that high-end platform, Intel is planning to release the new Ivy Bridge chips, set to replace the current Core i7 Sandy Bridge chips, in the latter part of Q1 2012.

Ivy Bridge chips should bring impressive performance gains over Sandy Bridge variants, so it’s worth holding out until for a few more months before you upgrade your CPU and motherboard.