Upgrade PC or buy a new PC?

I am considering upgrading my 6700K to an i9900kf, founder's edition 1080 to a 3060ti, and also planning on replacing the m2 SSD 256GB to a 2TB. All the upgrades will cost about $900. I already upgraded the RAM to 32GB since the old 2x8GB died on me. My CPU is liquid-cooled, and the system is about 6 years old. Is it worth upgrading the parts I mentioned, or would it be too much trouble since the computer may be approaching end of life soon in 1-3 years? My tower is a prebuilt Alienware Aurora R5, and I play in 1080p now since 1440p was creating too many performance issues for me. I hope the upgrades will help extend system life by about five years. That's my goal.

I will always recommend doing things yourself, whether a simple upgrade or building a new PC entirely. With that said, if you find a good deal on a prebuilt, go for it.

I mean, I would probably plan a new build at that point and salvage what you can. It's six years old; the ol' gal had a good run but I think it is time for a new PC.

I would usually say just upgrade the components, however my understanding is Alienware tends to have a lot of proprietary stuff. Is that the case with this model? If so, it might make sense to start fresh.

Also, I'm not sure the 3060 will be that big a jump over your 1080. You'll get ray tracing and DLSS, which is cool mind you, but in most other ways the 1080 will match and sometimes outperform the 3060. Maybe hold out for a 4060, or look for a cheap 3070 when the new generation comes out.

9900KF will bottleneck you in some games as the IPC and cache is not as good as the more modern CPUs. I know this since I upgraded from a 9900K to a 5950X. Since you have to upgrade your motherboard anyway for it, I would go with a more modern CPU and motherboard. You can reuse that 32GB DDR4 RAM in a new build. There are new CPUs from AMD and Intel soon, so that means there are good deals to be had on 5000 series AMD and 12000 series Intel right now. AMD is probably the cheapest best when you factor in the cost of a AM4 motherboard. 5800X3D is the best gaming CPU from AMD right now and will shit on a 9900KF, but the 5700X and up are all good.

Thanks for the input, everyone. I decided to build a new PC instead. I had two AMD builds before and liked them, so I built another AMD PC with an MSI B550 motherboard, 5900X with an i150H AIO cooler, and a 6700XT in a Corsair 5000D tower. It runs beautifully and has met all of my expectations for gaming.

It is quite an upgrade from my old Alienware PC, and it runs much cooler too. On average when gaming 40-50c CPU temp and 60-75c GPU temp. My old 1080 was running 90c overclocked and the CPU at 60c with no overclock. The Alienware was an absolute oven that always heated up the room. I didn't even need the heater on when I was gaming. I see that in most of my games that my CPU gets only 20-25% utilization while my GPU is at 70-100% utilization which means my CPU has plenty of headroom for an upgrade to a RDNA 3 card probably next year.

@Kjranu: Congrats on the system. I am glad that you are enjoying it. :)

Congrats on the upgrade.

I suggest you buy a new one

@regenasw: Yes, I built a new PC, which has worked great ever since. A huge improvement over my old Alienware. I'm also glad that I didn't wait to see whether or not Zen 4 was going to be worth it. I wanted to build a powerful PC for less than $2K, so Zen 4 was not going to do it for me. Honestly, I don't think we need Zen 4 right now. Just RDNA 3, and release Zen 4 for RDNA 4, haha! It feels like Zen 4 came out too early. What AMD should have done is iterate on 5800X3D, and 5900X, similar to what Intel did with Raptor Lake, which is an upgrade/iteration to Alder Lake.

@Kjranu: AM4 platform wasn't going to last forever. They have to move on if tech is to advance. AM5 and DDR5 are good, but too expensive right now. For pure gaming, a 5800X3D is the best bang for your buck when it come to high end performance. However, it gets destroyed by the 7950X when it comes to productivity.

Now is the time to upgrade, especially for a budget build. you won't find the 4090 or 7900 XTX in stock but you can get a 13600k for $250 or a full intel build with A770 / z690 motherboard for so cheap.

I recently got a gaming that uses DDR5 Ram but it's expensive for a 8GB or 16GB.

I think buy a new PC is the best option as the new PC will work smoothly as compare to the old one.