I’ve been pricing out components for my first new build in 20 years. (I’ve bought many ebay servers and a few mini PCs in between).
The parts are around $2k. But then I look at the amd ai max+ 395 PCs that are out or coming out shortly and I think I might be buying an already obsolete platform. For the same price I’d get 16 cores and over 2x the memory bandwidth.
Chasing the latest and greatest is an old problem and it’s never going to be solved. At some point, you buy the PC or parts which do what you want to do at that time for a reasonable price (however you define “reasonable”). One advantage offered by buying parts is the ability to upgrade piecemeal and keep up with growing system requirements over time, without the need to replace everything at once. My own PC of Theseus has been upgraded piecemeal over the last 15 years and runs modern games just fine. My wife’s PC has been on an upgrade treadmill for close on 25 years. Sure, the only thing which is actually that old is the case (she loves her case), but we’ve been able to keep up with modern hardware requirements while spreading the upgrade costs out over time.
It’s not that something faster is going to be out next year, it’s that it’s out now. There’s no way to upgrade an AM5 to quad channel ddr5 8000. You can keep the case and SSD for either PC.