Must have future tech

Hello Tamshin.

Pretty open ended questions, but one item that kinda fits is the relatively new development of M.2 SSD drive slots on the motherboards now.   Most Intel based motherboards now have two M.2 SSD drive slots available.   M.2 SSD drives are small and thin like RAM sticks, but lie flat on the mobo. They plug in at one end to a socket, and a single screw secures them at the other end to the motherboard.    What's special about M.2 drives is not only its reduced size, but also that there are two types.   

M.2 SATA SSD's share one SATA bus and would be no faster than normal SATA3 6GBPS drives.   

M.2 NVME SSD's can make use of the PCIE bus that video cards utilize, and as a result M.2 NVME SSD's are about 5 times faster than SATA drives.   Makes an ideal boot drive, and a fast drive for key programs and games as well.   M.2 NVME SSD is something you are going to want to take advantage of when you set up your new DS build.   

Edited by HockeyBuck - 27 May 2019 at 12:21am

AMD has come back hard into the marketplace with some high-end CPUs after being out of the high end for a very long time. The majority of games are very reliant on the performance of a single core where Intel still excels, but not by so much it's a no-brainer. The AMD model of giving you more cores for less money, means that there are some viable choices now. Gaming is so GPU dependent, that having the fastest CPU available is less important. CPUs in general are so powerful and speedy that even 3rd, 4th picks are plenty powerful enough for gaming.

Example: since I am pretty strictly a gamer, I would expect a Ryzen 7 2700 or 2700X to carry my rig well into the future with no trouble.

The next Big Thing that comes to mind is the RTX line of GPUs from Nvidia. Still the king of video, the newest offers ray-tracing tech and deep-learning, which has the ability to actually improve the look of your montor's native resolution. These are very new, and will no doubt be better utilized in the 2nd gen of their type. Right now, there are very few games (like maybe a dozen) that can even display the techs, but the cards are very powerful at displaying standard video code as well. The RTX 2080 Ti will run 4k displays at 60 fps+. They are Very Expensive, though.

ALWAYS!

AMD is newly out with an updated line of processors and a pretty darned good GPU, the Radeon 5700XT.

Nvidia has improved the RTX line with SUPER cards that boost performance on each of the 2060, 2070 and 2080 GPUs at the same price points as before.