Aside from Black Friday, Christmas and the holiday season is typically the next best time of year to buy PC hardware. Between Christmas sales and retailers selling off end-of-yearloss leaders, there are ample opportunities to score on upgrades or new builds.

With that in mind, we want to provide some insight on what’s a good purchase for Christmas 2015, and what you should hold off on purchasing.

Good buys right now

Intel’s Haswell CPUs:With the release of Skylake CPUs this past summer, the Haswell generation of Intel CPUs has seen some decent price drops and discounts. You can find great CPUs from the Haswell generation that nearly match the performance of Skylake CPUs, but for quite a bit cheaper. Thei5-4690K($230) can almost rival thei5-6600K($300), while thei7-4790K(330美元)了i7-6700K($420) a run for its money. (Of course, Haswell still uses DDR3 RAM, while Skylake is more future-proof with DDR4. But you probably won’t notice areal-world differencebetween using DDR3 RAM and the current line of DDR4 RAM.)

SSDs:Storage prices historically fall over time, and SSD prices fell quite a bit in 2015. You can now find 120 GB drives like theSanDisk SSD Plusselling for as little as $40, making SSDs a no-brainer purchase for even the lowest budget builds. With 500 GB models of theSanDisk Ultra IIandSamsung 850 EVOselling for $140-150, it also makes sense to upgrade your laptop’s storage to an SSD if you’re still using a clunky old hard drive.

AMD 200-series GPUs:AMD的300 -系列gpuout since the summer, but they’re only a small upgrade from the 200 series. In fact, their graphical processing horsepower is essentially identical. But right now you can find the 200-series equivalents for considerably less money than the 300-series. TheR9 280x,R9 290, andR9 290Xcan all be found on discount right now as they’re slowly phased out. These are still great graphics cards.

GPUs in general:One of the most common questions we’re asked is, “Should I buy a graphics card now, or wait until the next generation?” Assuming there aren’t delays, we still have untilat leastsummer 2016 for new graphics cards to hit the market with NVIDIA’s Pascal, and AMD’s Arctic Islands will hopefully come out before the end of the year. That’s a long time to wait for a new graphics card if you’re due for an upgrade. GPU prices are reasonable right now, with some great cards available for the price. There willalwaysbe a new generation of graphics cards on the horizon, so our advice is to buy now if it’s upgrade time.

DDR4 RAM:Prices for DDR4 are finally coming down into reasonable territory. In fact, they’ve alreadydropped by 40 percentin the last six months. They should no longer be a hurdle if you’re looking to upgrade to a new chipset.

1440p和4k屏幕：High-resolution screens are usually one of those luxury items reserved for the most hardcore PC gearheads. But some high-res monitors have fallen into seriously affordable territory. You can get a good 1440p monitor for as low as $250 (theAcer G257HU), and a 4K screen for $520 (theDell P2715Q).

What to wait on

Skylake CPUs:The prices of these CPUs are not reasonable right now in relation to Haswell CPUs that are nearly just as good.

What about Pascal and Arctic Islands？我应该等待那些吗？

As mentioned above, the upcoming generations of GPUs from NVIDIA (Pascal) and AMD (Arctic Islands) are still a ways away. We’ll see Pascal in summer 2016 at the earliest, and AMD is hoping to release Arctic Islands before the end of 2016. If you’re hurting for a new graphics card, don’t wait around. There will always be a new generation on the way, so we recommend upgrading whenever you feel it’s necessary.

With that advice, we at Logical Increments wish you a wonderful holiday season. May your CPUs stay cool and your CUDA cores busy. Let us know if you have any more holiday-related advice in the comments.