In online communities at least, people seem to be keen to stay on the cutting edge and always have the best and shiniest. Toms Hardware is going to attract this very audience.

I accept that I'm probably too far the other way on the spectrum of patient gamers......but people don't seem to think of the utility of the item and rather stay obsessed with "10% performance gains". For the vast majority of people, phones, laptops and computers can easily last over 5 years (sometimes 10 years depending on use case).

Although these frequent upgraders do give a good stock of items for people like me to pick up and stay in the sweetspot of positioning behind the frontline of cutting edge products on the secondhand market.

Anecdotally but several of my friends build a new PC and then slide their old one to siblings who game but don't need high end

Yeah I found that strange too most of my gaming PCs have lasted me somewhere between 7 and 10 years. Would seem completely unnecessary for most people

Don't forget this market insanity started around COVID, and has basically been succeeded by consequent crises with few dips.

The typical release cadence of PC components is around 4-6 years, which requires new motherboard, CPU, and RAM.
Adding in the GPU basically results in a new build, and that's being generous assuming no upgrades/changes to other parts like PSU and storage.

My take is that a lot of these people wishing to upgrade are those who have simply been holding out since 2020 or earlier. This seems to vaguely match up with the Steam Hardware results, with a fair number of people still using RTX 3000 series or RX 6000 series, of which even the top end cards are starting to become par/outperformed by their modern mid level counterparts.

I replaced my old PC only because I went from an i5 6600 to a ryzen 7800x3d and thus needed to replace the RAM as well.
Combone that with an old 4GB 960 and an older 2TB HDD and wanting another case the math was quite easy.

It's alao a quesrion how you interpret that? At what point is it a new PC vs upgrading? If you have replaced all parts from the original starting build?
Might explain the higher percentage

I recently built new to pass my current rig to my kid who is only interested in Roblox and other smaller games. And I mean the entire rig, including the desk.

I would imagine that 40% is saying that hoping for a best case scenario to occur. Prices haven't even plateaued yet, they are still rising, so at some point regardless their enthusiasm they will be priced out of the market.

The thought that hardware prices will drop to normal levels in the next few years is just wishful thinking.

I don't believe in "just upgrading" at this point. If you built your PC with efficiency in mind, there's like nothing you can even "upgrade". Anything I can think of will get outdated by the time you need the next thing. A new GPU? Oh, you are still on Gen3... that means a new motherboard. Updating from AM4 to AM..4? Nah that feels like bad value, but AM5 requires DDR5, both of which have already been out for almost 5 years and will likely get replaced in a year or 2. Upgrading RAM? Again, just bumping DDR4 for a marginally better/larger cap DDR4 feels like bad value and unwarranted. Storage? Whoops, your old motherboard doesn't support NVMe booting and it's BIOS hasn't been touched in over 5 years! You are lucky if you even have an M.2 slot.

And believe it or not, these prices are not even the worst they've ever been, so might as well just get a new PC every 5 or so years, maybe keep your old storage, CPU cooler, PSU and case, but that's about it.

I finally got round to a significant upgrade to my PC last week. I've been running the same PC for 10 years, and it's really been dying. Fans and HDDs were failing, and it couldn't play new games at all.

I haven't replaced my GPU (still on a GTX 980ti) but I jumped to some decent DDR4 RAM, a better CPU, and moved into an SFF case, but I have no confidence any prices are set to stabilise, so I just gave in and built what I could.