I don’t know about you, but every so often I get what I call ‘The Itch’. It starts off as a passing interest and all too quickly becomes an overwhelming urge to just buy something. Anything. Much to my bank balance's misery. That’s usually when my upgrades happen. They’re not things I’ve put months of thought into, but seemingly the sheer need to be a consumer. Once I’ve decided I’m buying something that’s it, basically.

This year I’m trying to change though. I’m going to try to plan out my hardware purchases. No unnecessary gear, no impulse buys. It’s all about working out what gaming hardware is coming over the horizon, and planning my purchases appropriately. So join me then, in planning out what PC component to upgrade next.

If you take a look at my rig you can see it’s a fairly decent performer. That said, there’s at least four things I’m heavily interested in picking up in the next 12 months. The first of these is simple - another 8GB memory. I know basically no games cap out 8GB, but I can feel the tide going that way. And hey, it’s a cheap upgrade.

Secondly, the graphics card. I’ve got a GeForce GTX 970, but I’ve got a serious eye on the Pascal GPUs coming. If the GTX 970 equivalent is a cheap price then I’m all in, and I can offload my GTX 970 to pay for it. That all depends on whether Pascal is the great saviour Nvidia paints it to be, however.

Thirdly I think it’s probably about time I invested in an SSD. The sky-high prices have put me off for a long while, so I took the middle ground and opted for an SSD/HDD hybrid. I still finding loading really quick though, so I’m finding it difficult to quantify investing any cash in it.

Lastly there’s the prospect of a VR headset. If I go for any in particular I’m getting the Oculus Rift. I’ve had a go with the HTC Vive but it’s just too large and unwieldy to set up at home for me, and I’m banking on Oculus delivering a far slicker experience.

If the launch titles are there then I’m going to back an Oculus Rift my very next hardware purchase of 2016, but failing that then I’m going to hold out for the next generation of graphics cards.

What PC component are you looking to upgrade next? Any hardware must-haves coming early in 2016? Let us know!