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I’m rocking a 14 year old CPU (3570k), 16gb of DDR3 and a gtx1070 (non-ti).
I was so god damn stoked to build a new machine this year, only to watch first ddr5 then ddr4 soar our of my price range…
Now even the used stuff around me is jumping in price, with mobo cpu ram deals getting scooped up only for the ram to pop back up at twice the price the next day.
Fuck AI.
I upgraded my 8 year rig right when Trump was elected thinking tariffs would screw me. Did not forsee AI being the bigger factor
Gratz, good decision.
I live on the other side of the pond and did not build a new rig in 2024, because the tariffs were never going to affect me much… Did not foresee the bubble inflating this big though. I originally wanted to build in autumn 2025, now I have no idea when it’ll actually happen.
I started putting together a RAID, got the housing and the first drive, the plan was to buy a drive with each paycheck until I had the 4 drives I need. The first drive was like $250, arrived last week. Then I checked the price this week and the same drive is now $650.
The other 39% are optimistically hoping the bubble will pop within that 2 years and there will still be a market to buy from.
I have no such illusions - but a bit of me wonders if, possibly, this may drive the pc market back in the direction of its origins:
Devs were incentivised to write more efficient, leaner code because resources were expensive.
PC users focused on squeezing every. goddamn. drop. of performance out of their existing gear. Overclocking wasnt about making your 200 fps into 300 - it was about making that aging beast play something it had no right to even run.
I dont look forward to the coming days with any optimism… but maybe this whole scene needed a purging fire to foster new growth and diversity.
Or maybe we’ll just purge the source of these issues. Or both. Both would be nice. I can dream.
Don’t worry they’ll turn their datacenters into virtual PC hosting so that people who can’t afford to upgrade will have to rent the hardware…
Middleman all the things. It pains me to say that, in all likelihood, this period of time will be known for nothing but reinventing something that already exists - making a worse version of it - then enshitify.
What blows me away is while most people read dystopian stories and view them as cautionary tales… these rejects are using it as a framework.
“We finally succeeded in building the ‘Torment Nexus’, inspired by the book ‘Don’t create the Torment Nexus’.”
Dont forget how many of these twats name their companies after shit that literally screams “we are the baddies.”
Goodness who ever would have thought that “child crushers inc :)” would be crushing children?
That plus the ever growing push for device linked personal ID on personally owned device feels like the real end goal. Governments can already snoop all web traffic. Now they want to close the gap on device level surveillance by pushing more and more people towards renting virtual devices with traceable payment methods. For people who don’t, device link to personal ID means they no longer have any of that mess of having to prove ownership or who took the action.
Removing the tinfoil hat though, I really hope this causes cloud resource cost to drop through the floor.
It was always about control. No tin foil. Just reality. When you get to these levels of disproportionate power, greed, and corruption… you need to be able to quickly “stamp out” anything that even vauguely looks like a threat.
They dont want us to communicate. Obviously. Communication leads to revolution. No secrets. No encryption. No rights. Be a good drone and keep your head down. Smile for the cameras.
Thats ezactly what they want to do, bur when that happens we must resist it. Play old game. Use legacy hardware. Participation is tantamount to acceptance.
I’ll stick with factorio if that is the case.
Devs were incentivised to write more efficient, leaner code because resources were expensive.
AI are the devs now. And efficient code is probably the last thing they are known for doing.
hopefully this wont end with pc component market drying completely so companies can force us to use their stupid remote pc crap.
That’s absolutely the end goal. You’ll own nothing and you’ll like it.
builds a new PC.
continues to play Half Life 2.
Switching to Linux breathed new life into my current, newest machine, built in 2019. I lost track of time, and didn’t realize it had been that long, but it runs fine and does what I want it to do, so why blow money on a new machine?
I had exactly the same experience and I use the Linux machine for gaming.
Replacing Windows with Linux feels equivalent to a CPU and memory upgrade.
New is nice, but not at these prices, yeesh. I built my new rig just before the RAMpocalypse. And also the rig before that in 2020 just before the crypto had inflated the GPU prices too high. Call me lucky. Hopefully the prices go down in about five years. 😅
I run my boxes for so long I end up having to basically build a whole new rig by the time it is obsolete thanks to socket, RAM and GPU changes. Feels like it almost defeats the purpose of rolling your own. I mostly just use my Steam Deck at this point. Tired of keeping up with all that combined with shortages.
This is what I’ve done for 35 years. My current build is almost seven years old. My previous build, now 12 years old, is my current media server, the ones before that are recycled.
Also, by the time I build a new one, I need to research everything all over again, because it’s all changed so much. I don’t keep up with the hardware very well between builds.
I don’t think this defeats the purpose, as I don’t expect a computer to last forever. I do reuse what few parts I can, such as power supplies, cases, fans, and hard drives.
True. I guess it’s not completely purposeless as I’ll reuse and repurpose what i can. But for last build especially I could barely reuse any of it. GPU, increasing power reqs overall and avoiding bottlenecking seem to muck up that strategy the most. If anything i enjoy what feels like a huge leap in performance every time i build one.
I think it’s always been like that, unless you upgrade a CPU for a 10% improvement.
I tended to do GPU as one upgrade, then the rest a few years later, treating the RAM, CPU and mobo as one unit.
But since prices of everything have been out of whack for ages now, I’m sticking with this 1060/i5-8400 box until something gives. If I want the latest whizzo graphics, I’ll play my PS5.
There used to be a sweet spot of early adopter where you could resell early enough and still make back 75% or more of the price. It’s just so prohibitive and unnecessary now to upgrade like that
From my own experience I would say that you’re probably not finding a chance to do intermediary upgrades because upfront you bought the top-range everything and maxed out things like memory and storage, and/or did not get a really good hobbyist motherboard (which is the part where you should really splurge).
I don’t get into the muggers’ game of top-range were you pay 2x-3x for just an extra 10% performance but instead get the stuff at the sweet-spot of price-performance, and then some years latter I can get stuff with what was before top-range performance at normal prices without a premium.
Similarly I don’t max out on things like memory and storage from the very start - I get what I need then and when I see that I need more I get more, by which point normally (not this shit going on right now) Moore’s Law means it’s way cheaper.
For example, the PC I’m using now for gaming recently got an improved CPU which wasn’t even out when I first bought this PC and which was near top range back then (as server CPU, even), which would’ve been $200 back then but was only $17 second hand some years later.
Of course, this way of doing things got totally fucked up with this PC parts bubble. Frankly the last PC upgrade I did was replacing Windows with Linux which in terms of how it feels was equivalent to a CPU and memory upgrade.
For one build I made that mistake. I went with SFF partly due to motherboard and RAM shortages and i could barely upgrade it… I won’t do that again. But before that i would start at low to mid spec for components, a mobo and PSU with room to grow, and slowly max them out over time.
However, like i said in another reply it seems like i can repurpose less and less in later builds as tech evolves more rapidly these days and or I run into a wall with bottlenecking something or another even if i can upgrade a component. As a result I’m definitely taking a longer pause this time.
This box better not break anytime soon lmaooo
One of my motherboard’s memory slots went bad, no idea why. Figuring out if it was RAM or, if the motherboard, exactly what was wrong, was a tense few hours because neither is getting replaced.
Dodged the crypto gold rush twice by managing to buy my GPUs before they happened. The last hard drive purchase was more than a year ago, a 2TB Seagate to replace a damaged one. The PC I’m on now was built four years ago, and the most pricey upgrade was getting a 5700X3D.
Now I think I’ll have to be more careful while I use my PC, because we’re back to 1995 pricing.
It’s not like we didn’t have a near infinite amount of games available from retro 8bit games all the way to the latest and greatest. Honestly, there’s enough games or there that don’t require high end PCs to play.
Heck, I got a long ass list of games I bought nearly 10 years ago that I haven’t ended played yet because I bought so many. On PC and Switch!
I’m good.
that’s especially true since games just kinda stopped looking better imo. i think 2014-2019 was the peak of game graphics, i just can’t stand that smeary ai upscaled temporal anti-aliasing look, i prefer msaa or just plain ssaa, it looks so much crisper
For me that’s not true for VR games. There’s still a lot to do in terms of graphics and they are harder and harder to run with VR headsets that always need more resolutions to make the games look how they should look without so many visible pixels. The new 4K per eye panels are pretty much perfect but that’s really hard to run.
25% plan to buy this year. 40% in the next two years.
RAM prices have quadrupled since this time last year. So if only 25% as many people buy this year than last year, then the line still went up for the RAM companies.
This is a huge windfall for them, and there is absolutely zero reason for them to go back to $75/32GB DDR5 kits.
Shame that nobody is capable of restraint…
there is absolutely zero reason for them to go back to $75/32GB DDR5 kits.
There’s enough memory manufacturers that as long as the cartel was successfully busted when I forget which government took action against them last year, that they should start competing on price again as soon as demand re-normalizes
The vast majority of the market is made by only three companies who all have dramatically raised prices. Sk Hynix, Samsung and Micron.
Micron sailed off into the sunset, flipping the bird at consumers with both hands. Hynix & Samsung are equally quadruple-pricing versus a year ago. All of them are seeing insane, record profits.
Unless a government steps in and does something crazy like declaring RAM a subsidy & setting price controls… this is just the new normal.
Micron only killed their consumer memory division, they’re still making memory for b2b customers, so they can still affect and be affected by market forces when it comes to memory pricing
I know is probably not possible, but I wish a competitor manufacturer would rise during this times and when the bubble pops we would let these worms starve.
competitor manufacturer
There’s Chinese ram that’s becoming good. But that doesn’t mean Americans will be allowed to buy it.
But really gamers are the worst about consumerism. Nvidia is the worst and gamers keep going back. Steve from Gamer’s Nexus had a funny chart in one of his videos a year or so ago. It was a flow chart about gamer spending on hardware showing all the advantages of AMD and Intel in gaming with a big arrow at the bottom that was labeled something like “And then you ignore everything and give all your money to Nvidia.”
honestly nvidia doesn’t give a hoot if we stop.
"Consumer (gaming) GPUs make up roughly 7% to 11% of Nvidia’s total revenue, and an even smaller percentage of their net profits. "
the only reason they sell to us still is the extent they can repackage commercial gpus for us.
Nvidia is the worst and gamers keep going back.
It’s still the default, unfortunately, as those gamers are usually swayed by popular opinion (see r/buildapc, fucking awful FOMO city), and AMD drivers have been hit-or-miss and they’ll usually threaten for a refund and buy another green box.
“60% of gamers have no plans to build a computer for the foreseeable future.” The unspoken part is, “and the hardware manufacturers don’t care”. Maybe they will after the bubble pops, or maybe not.
I just bought a mini desktop-- Ryzen 5 with 16Gb memory and 1Tb SSD. It cost me almost $500US. It probably was $100 less last year. I’m not a gamer, but I do make heavy use of 3D CAD and sometimes with large assemblies. And my old Nitro 5 and 1650 nVidia had been starting to struggle.
I do like my new little computer, with Aurora 44 installed, win11 was aborted on first boot, it’s a snappy little box despite the modest specs. The downside is, there isn’t enough time to make a cuppa tea while waiting on a model regen.
And who knows, I may live long enough to afford another stick of ram, or I may win the lottery someday-- assuming I buy a lottery ticket first.
“60% of gamers have no plans to build a computer for the foreseeable future.” The unspoken part is, “and the hardware manufacturers don’t care”. Maybe they will after the bubble pops, or maybe not.
The ones building consumer hardware probably care. There’s only 3 major DRAM manufacturers, but several companies that sell RAM sticks. Those guys aren’t gonna be having fun. AMD, nVidia and Intel are making out like bandits from the GPU sales, but the AIBs are most definitely not, since you don’t really buy a Sapphire or Gigabyte card for your data center, it’ll be direct from nVidia/AMD/Intel for hyperscalers and everyone else buys a complete server from someone like HP or Dell generally.
There are like 10 companies making out big on hardware for AI, but dozens of companies that will be hit hard.
And don’t forget all the suppliers of the other parts that don’t have any business with datacenters: motherboards makers (not sure they got anything), case makers, power supply makers, peripherals makers, etc.
All of the ecosystem could go down if the bubble lasts long enough.
Oh, the consumer companies care. But they currently don’t matter anymore that we do. And let’s be honest, the if and when this AI bubble does pop and all the data centers have closed. The prices will drop enough for consumers to eat up the sudden surplus as if a dam broke because it will “feel cheap and a bargain”. There is no lose-lose here for DRAM manufacturers because consumers ain’t that bright.
My rig is 10y old but it doesn’t actually feel all that old thanks to Linux; I also play mostly 2d games so that probably helps. Needless to say I’m overdue for an upgrade but that prob won’t happen anytime soon now :(
Mine is about 7 and I keep forgetting it’s not “current gen” because it still runs new games at mid-high settings at the framerate and resolutions I care about.
