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 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.
builds a new PC.
continues to play Half Life 2.
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.
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.
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
Honestly, what game is coming out that’s a killer app that isn’t live service trash that they’ll cancel in a few months? I wish I still had my old consoles to play games on, some of them were real bangers even if I had beaten them. Space Marine 2 was my last top tier purchase and I only played it for a few weeks. Wasn’t a fan of their revision of the combat system.
Outside of that, none of the big studios are making ANYTHING worth the barriers to entry now. I don’t play at 4K, and I rather play New Vegas again for things I missed and different options.
I haven’t really felt the need to upgrade since I first got a gaming PC. I’ve only ever replaced it when the last one was broken enough to not be worth trying to repair.
The funny thing is, these days maybe 85% of my time gaming is spent playing games that absolutely don’t need all the processing power I have. It is nice to be able to play the occasional AAA game, but all of them have looked fine to me. I haven’t really thought “damn this could look/run so much better if I spent another thousand dollars or so.”
I’ve actually been joking with friends about the unnecessary level of detail in some of these games. I was streaming God of War Ragnarok for them and we zoomed in on Kratos’ head and we joked about how some guy had to model the wrinkles on the back of his head/neck when it never matters and you only notice it when you’re going out of your way to zoom in on the details.
Games have reached a level of detail that is more than enough to convey any gameplay or narrative sufficiently. There’s nothing to keep pace with and I’m just hoping this one lasts long enough to avoid the price spike.
I feel like that’d be the stats even if we didn’t have a component disruption. Do all gamers build a new machine every year? They’d be broke (said the guy who buys / builds a lot of toys).
It’s cool to phrase non-news as clickbait. 50% people think $MYTEAM will win the big game. Holy crap, that’s news!
It is still a metric of whether we’re aspiring to build a pc or not. I have been meaning to build a new PC for years. Now I have entirely shelved those plans. I wish I hadn’t procrastinated :(
Glad I was able to build a new one a couple years ago. Sure wish I could afford a fucking hard drive though.
I generally upgrade my PC every five years. This usually means new motherboard, CPU, and RAM, and this last time a case as well. The last time I did it was in 2019, not counting the brief window where I was able to purchase an RTX 3080 at or near MSRP in around 2022. Not only am I overdue for an upgrade, my needs have changed pretty drastically since 2019.
Back then I was all about RGB, and sought to create the quintessential unicorn vomit PC. While I still like the aesthetic, I now know that maintenance of all that RGB can be a hassle. You need to manage more cables, and components on LED strips can fail, ruining the look of the case. The case is made of mostly tempered glass, but It’s now on the floor, obviously not ideal. The PC isn’t the only rig on my desk now (ham radios are also called rigs), and the PC has to share space with three or four of them, all with power, coax, grounding wire, and control cables of their own.
My kid is getting old enough to enjoy PC gaming and I want build a gaming machine for him. But alas. He will have to just enjoy my aging PS4 instead.
If there are economic bubbles, I am figuring on picking up some gear on the cheap after the big companies start falling apart. For now, I am just buying stuff that aren’t fairly generic and not prone to aging. In this case, a THOR NAS desktop tower. My older THOR V2 chassis isn’t quite right for modern GPU lengths, so hopefully the THOR NAS would be able to accommodate my older hardware while permitting the new stuff.
I got about 20tb of SATA SSD and a optical drive, so I needed a tower with front bays to accommodate those. Plus, I will be trying out this newfangled “M.2” stuff with my next build for the OS & Gaming drives, which takes up further case space.
Just like the Epstein billionaires class saw 1984 and thought it was a model for governance, they saw Matrix and thought it was an awesome way to run people’s lives. Of course, they take the role of the central computer while chips in our brains make us happy to obediently serve them.
A hobby where 40% of people need a new fancy computer every 2 years is bad for the planet.
Who said every 2 years tho?
I’m planning to build within the next 2 years because my GPU came out in 2020 and my CPU in 2019. So I’m part of that 40%.
I was going to build a new rig last year since I use it for work more than gaming and could use a faster CPU and more RAM, but I think we all know why I’m postponing.
I think most of the 40% will be people whose setup was already getting old and then the goddamn LLM-induced RAM crisis hit.
I upgraded my RAM to 96GB in 2022, any new PC will have to be significantly better to be worth upgrading to. Currently I would have to pay 750€ just to have the same RAM as I already do, which is more than half of what my whole system originally cost.
There is just nothing to reasonably upgrade to right now. Games will not require faster hardware because of this, causing even less incentive to upgrade to a new system.
My current system will probably last another 10 years if the current slop continues like this.
I wanted to upgrade to at least 64 or ideally 128 last year. Ideally a new build with AM5 and DDR5, though an upgrade in-place would’ve been useful too. Then RAM prices started shooting up and now I don’t know if I’m upgrading anytime soon at all.
Though now I’m considering just biting the bullet and getting 2 extra sticks of DDR4 and a zen 3 CPU to keep my rig going for another 4 or 5 years. 32 -> 64 GB and 6 -> 12 or 16 cores. Trouble is, if I upgrade my current computer, I’d have to do it out of my own money, whereas if I build a new one, I can make it a business PC since I do in fact use it for work more than gaming. Between income tax, VAT and everything, a business PC is like 50% cheaper than a personal PC for me. So now I’m riding out decision paralysis hoping that RAM will get cheaper again and I can build a brand new PC in a year or 2 lol
What are you doing to be struggling with 32GB of RAM? Like my home server is definitely RAM limited right now with 32GB but that’s a server not a PC
I used to want more RAM so I can mount Portage’s tmpdir in tmpfs. Now I want more RAM to run fancier LLMs locally for coding agents.
I’m currently at 32 GB.
Who said every 2 years tho?
you forgot what thread you are in lol:
60% of PC gamers have no plans to build a new PC in **the next two years **— AI pricing crunch on RAM and other components paralyze enthusiast market
Building one in the next two years doesn’t imply the last one was just built yesterday though.
Steam hardware survey shows RTX 3060 as the most common single GPU model at 4%. Other 20, 30, 40 series GPUs are still common too. As are 50 series, but they’re far from dominant. 10 series and older are uncommon but still in use.
On the AMD side, a significant amount of people are still rocking old GPUs like the RX 580 and a few even still run lower end old GPUs like the 550. All in all, most GPUs in use are not the newest generation at all. For CPUs we unfortunately don’t get data beyond core count, but I imagine the average CPU is even older than the average GPU because a ton of people are still on AM4. I’m one and I’ve got friends who are as well.
For those people consumerism is the hobby. They don’t get anything by buying new computer every 2 years, other than the act of buying itself. For wast majority of gamers the cycle is closer to 8-10 years. Personally, I’m playing on a laptop that I bought in 2020 and it runs everything I want it to run no problem, and I’m planning to change it only when it breaks irreparably.
Personally, I’m playing on a laptop that I bought in 2020 and it runs everything I want it to run no problem, and I’m planning to change it only when it breaks irreparably.
Look up a YouTube video on how to disassemble it and clean out your fans and radiators. Then replace your CPU/GPU die thermal paste along with thermal putty and you can greatly extend your laptop’s lifespan. I also have a gaming laptop from 2020 and doing this dropped average temps significantly (somewhere around 10c), and on my device the teardown was pretty simple. I used Honeywell PTM 7950 on the CPU/GPU dies and and upsiren utp-x ultra putty for my VRAM and VRMs. You will need 91% iso alcohol and some paper towels for cleaning existing paste and ideally compressed air for blasting out stubborn areas of dust, for this I use a rechargeable air duster but canned air and air compressors work great too. The laptop went from sounding like a jet turbine to being silent 90% of the time when running a normal load. During games they come on but nowhere near the max.
One thing to keep an eye on with old laptops is the battery… if it starts to deform and swell it needs to come out. Mine is still maybe 70% as good as it was new so I’m planning on replacing it soon but it’s not too pressing.
I honestly can’t remember the last time I played a game that couldn’t be played on a potato. No AAA games have interested me in years
Don’t count out us cheap bastards. I love buying used gear. I don’t play games on them, I just run my own stuff. Local llms home servers for media and such.
Of course with proxmox, my need for multiple devices has shrunk considerably. I’d be happy if I could get an old mining rig with a few midrange gpus in them. I’d rather run my own llm than pay a premium for a subscription. I can have it run my home automation and use it for filthy sexy chat bots. Could also use them for coding agents.
If you’re dumping 2-3 year old nvidia hardware, I’m buying.
