Why we have postponed the Desktop BBG – Computer – .Plans

You are used to receiving a Best Buy Guide every first of the month. One month that is a BBG for laptops, the other one for desktop systems. Since we published a Laptop BBG on October 1, it is logically time for a Desktop BBG on November 1. Anyone who is diligently refreshing the front page will have noticed that it is not there yet.

Since this is a very rare occurrence – I cannot recall a case where we did not publish the Desktop BBG properly on time – a little explanation is in order. We live in a bizarre time, or unprecedented times as we so often hear, but covid has nothing to do with the postponement of this BBG. However, the timing this month is so unfortunate in our opinion and so far indeed unprecedented, that for this one time we have decided not to publish the BBG on the first of the month. So that is a conscious choice; we have not forgotten.

The reason is the introduction of a few important product series, the impact and performance of which we want to map out before we publish a BBG. We are of course talking about Nvidia’s new 3000 series, of which the RTX 3080 and 3090 have already appeared at the end of September and of which the RTX 3070 came out on October 27. That’s exactly one day before AMD came out with its highly anticipated Big Navi graphics cards; on October 28, the Radeon 6000 cards from AMD appeared.

A week later, on November 5, the latest generation of Zen 3 processors codenamed Vermeer should appear. AMD promises to take a big step in gaming performance and that, like video cards, is extremely relevant for the gaming systems in the BBG. So we want to wait for the performance of those new processors before the BBG is published, because we believe that no one benefits from a BBG that is outdated less than a week after publication.

In addition, we would like to wait and see how the prices and availability of both the AMD 6000 cards and the RTX cards from Nvidia develop the day after introduction. After all, there is little point in including brand new cards in a BBG that are as poorly available as RTX 3090 and RTX 3080 in the weeks after launch.

In short: we first want to have all new products extensively tested in our test lab and be able to give a meaningful assessment of the prices and performance of the new video cards and processors. Then we can provide you with solid advice in a BBG that we hope is not immediately outdated when published. So stay tuned!

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