TechSpot PC Buying Guide: 2H 2024

It's been a rather uneventful year in the PC hardware market. Most of us were hoping that AMD's Ryzen 9000 series CPUs would bring significant improvements, but they have turned out to be a major disappointment, as they are not consistently faster than their predecessors in most common desktop tasks or gaming.

Fortunately for AMD, the increasingly reported stability issues of Intel's 14th and 13th generation Core processors have turned them from something we could recommend for specific systems and use cases into something we simply can't recommend at all.

For pro content creators, AMD offers the Threadripper 7000 series, featuring up to 128 threads, quad-channel memory support, and 48 direct PCIe 5.0 lanes for the "non Pro" models. Granted, these CPUs cost significantly more per core, not to mention the need for more expensive motherboards and registered memory. For now, the Ryzen 9 7000 series remains the best value for core-heavy tasks.

Meanwhile, SSD prices have stabilized. PCIe 5.0 drives have been on the market for a while, but with current flash density and cooling solutions they aren't much faster than the best PCIe 4.0 drives in sustained workloads.

As usual, the TechSpot PC Buying Guide includes four component lists and builds with recommendations for different budgets and purposes. However, the ideal system for you may very well be a combination of two or more of these builds.