Should you wait for Black Friday to upgrade your PC?

Ask the internet if you should wait until Black Friday to upgrade your PC, and you’ll get a stream of comments dismissing it as a time for good deals.

They’re not wrong, but they’re not right, either. Sure, if you’ve got your eye on a very specific part, your chances of a deep discount are generally a toss-up. It can be as likely you’ll get a better price at another time of the year as you will during Black Friday. The more niche it is, the rougher your odds.

But if all you care about is price and are semi-flexible on features for your components, you can chain together Black Friday deals for ultimate savings. (In fact, you can go the full distance and build an entire budget PC for stupid cheap.)

So which way should you go? Because the situation gets particularly confusing in the early weeks of November, when everything’s on sale but it’s not clear what’s an actual bargain, I put together some general guidelines to help. (Things are even worse this year, since deals already began as a slow drip in October!) These should allow you to find the best balance between sweet savings and waiting indefinitely for a discount that may never come.

Black Friday 2020: What to buy now, what to wait for

Below are my buying recommendations for the most common PC parts that people upgrade, tailored specifically for Black Friday 2020. Current supply and demand issues are incorporated into the advice.

For components not covered on this list, you can hone your own ability to figure out sales trends (and just how to spot deals) by following the advice in our Black Friday FAQ.

Let us help you: If you do decide to wait for Black Friday deals, we'll be tracking the best prices on PC parts during Black Friday, both in the lead-up and the week of.

CPU

Gordon Mah Ung/IDG

Whether AMD or Intel, we recommend you wait for as long as you can, but don't harbor expectations of last year's barn-burner deals.

Wait. Last year's advice carries over to 2020, but for completely the opposite reason. Instead of expecting fire-sale prices on older chips (the deal to beat in 2019 was the $130 Ryzen 7 2700X at Micro Center), we could all be hard-pressed to find deep discounts on CPUs. AMD's launch of its new Ryzen 5000-series part came with a price increase, meaning the company may no longer feel the need to woo consumers with steep discounts on previous generations. On top of that, AMD's budget and mid-tier parts have been extremely popular during the pandemic: You can't find the Ryzen 3 3100 at MSRP or Ryzen 3 3300X at all, and the Ryzen 5 3600 is backordered at Amazon until mid-November. As for team blue, Intel has never indulged in substantial discounts, and for them to buck that trend now would be extremely surprising.

So with these circumstances hanging overhead, waiting for as long as possible before buying will let you see how the dust settles from the shakeups brought by 2020 and AMD's continued ascent. Just familiarize yourself the...

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