what i was thinking of doing was building something decent but without a dedicated GPU to begin with since i'm not a big PC gamer & i'm more interested in it being good at General Purpose Things. so I can save a chunk of money up front and then add a GPU in later if I need it

so I've priced up what i think are decent parts excluding a GPU and it's come to £1208..... that is still A Lot Of Money.... but i would get a lot of use out of it
the last one I built lasted me over 10 years (admittedly with most of the parts except the CPU and MB being swapped out at some point)

with the price of ram inflating I'm wondering if I should just buy some now in case it goes up even more.... I guess it's not coming down until the AI bubble pops

I think I've pretty much committed to doing this... I ordered the damn RAM

Now i'm wondering if i should get a PCIe gen 4 or 5 SSD. Gen 5 should be much faster but all I see online is redditors going noooo it makes no difference for gaming noooo
OK but what about not gaming. What about analysing 64GB SD card rips like I was doing a month ago. What about that Mr Reddit

Weirdly Gen 5 SSD prices seem to have come DOWN considerably in the last month while RAM has shot up. What's that about. Feels like these things just fluctuate randomly and you can be up or down £100 depending on the phases of the moon

@lion ram's more expensive because of AI (sigh)
If the price doesn't increase that much there is no downside to gen 5, go for it dude

@lion just make sure to pick a reasonable ssd, I recommend checking the test results from https://pcpartpicker.com

@lion afaik, ai companies announced they're going to be buying lots of chips including ram and intend to use up as much of the global supply of the silicon wafers all used for CPU's, GPU's and ram chips as possible in the coming year, so the market it anticipating a sudden reduction in availability as silicon production pivots to supplying ai datacenters