I would bite the bullet and upgrade if I thought AI wasn’t a bubble, and the new prices were the new normal.
It’s going to roll over and die soon. Not because it’s bad ; bad technology absolutely has replaced good technology many times in the past ! Just look at streaming slowly replacing Blu-Rays.
It will fail, because it is too expensive, irremediably so.
With an initial config on am4, I left it untouched (except from watercooling because the shit is fun) for 7 years, with a ryzen 7 5700x3d and doubling the RAM capacity (16Go to 32Go). The new ryzen died and I got a ryzen 9 5950x, I paired it with a rx 9070xt and a ventirad, and now I hope it can last for a decade. I don’t even play modern demanding games (most recent on the list would be cyberpunk 2077)
I built my first PC last November and because RAM was about 2-3 times the price that it should have been I passed on it. Now it’s like 5x the price and it’s not even a choice anymore, but I think I still made the right decision by not financially supporting those prices. Got 16GB of second hand SODIMM and some Sodimm to Dimm adapters and honestly the PC is fine. In my original parts list I had planned to get 128GB just to max out the board and not think about it ever again (would have been a reasonable 550€ back in September) but now I think I’ll actually coast a bit longer with my 16GB. It should be fine for the next few years at least, especially since there’s no overhead from Windows BS on my machine.
Out of curiosity, is there any other reason for 128GB other than “just to max it out”?
Because if you don’t actually need it, you’d get better performance with 64GB or 48GB due to being able to use higher clock speeds. (Depends on the CPU)
Nope, no other reason! I’m just getting a decent deal on PC parts when I let my employer buy them for me so I have a tendency to splurge on tech without really double-checking the specs. Can’t justify that with the current RAM prices though haha
But thanks for the tip! I’ll keep it in mind when I do actually decide to upgrade sometime
To play all those games that aren’t being made?
wdym? There are tons of awesome games being made all the time. I’ve really been enjoying Slay the Spire 2.
I don’t think anyone needs a new rig to play STS2, this decade anyway.
This whole post seems founded on the shaky assumption that all PC gamers would be on a roughly 3 year rebuild cycle anyway…
Not in my experience.
Even my most PC enthusiast friends would only ever have been upgrading every ~5 years anyway. That makes the ‘40% in 3 years’ an unexpectedly high number of upgraders.
My main PC rig is closer to ten years now, and no upgrade in sight. Cost of living with kids has made expensive hobbies untenable.
Same here.
I jumped on Ryzen in 2017 when it seemed to be actually taking a step forward.
Then I’ve just…not needed a new CPU since then. A GPU 3 years later, but other than that, I’m trucking along nicely.
On the bright side, now I can divert my small amount of extra money to more tattoos since my main expensive hobby is priced out by ai slopcenters
On a whim I decided to look into getting a second ssd, so I could dual boot more easily, etc. The 2 TB nvme SSD I bought over 2 years ago for $135 is now $370 🤯 Yeah nah…
Lol not gonna happen. Ill wait until my drives die at that price.
Don’t exaggerate that badly you piece of s…wait a second, let me check. Oh fuck. I haven’t checked prices since I upgraded my main server and main gaming rig. I would now have to pay like 5000 more. After just checking some main components. But hey, the tower probably is still okay…
Fuck. This. Shit.
My 1080ti’s retirement has been indefinitely postponed.
I mean why build a pc with specs that I could have had years ago for the same price.
40% of gamers: cause I didn’t build it those years ago
Some percentage, including me, would have built a second or third
For a while now new hardware has been like 10% faster and also 10% more expensive, so they could have saved a lot of R&D time by continuing to manufacture everything from 2020 and added just a couple of new things to the top of the product stack.
Exactly. My computer is 7 years old. I can build a new one that is twice as fast for triple what I spent then. No thanks.
Just 60? Everyone I know has dropped all plans for the foreseeable future. Even those building their first PC.
The other 40% are waiting for the AI bubble to burst
Yeah, the hope isn’t dead.
Dont worry, we gotta wait just two more decades and prices will drop.
I’m afraid they can continue artificially inflating their value longer than my PC will last…
“Hope is just a first step on a road to disappointment”
After one price hike after another for almost a decade soon, roughly since 2017. There is no point to hope anymore, there will either be some new issues or manufactures have just gotten used to the high prices and will not lower those significantly. Even if they do start to bring down prices and AI shit ends, everyone will run to upgrade their rigs and scalpers will take full advantage of it. This is new reality.
Better to just find a new hobby.
I bought my RTX 2060 for $300 in 2019. I could have gotten an RX 9060 XT for the same money that’s almost twice as fast and had 2 gb more RAM when it launched (16gb never dropped in price to msrp afaik)
You can whine about it, but you got double the performance in 6 years.
When the AI shit flops and when it does bursts… there will pc parts for everyone!! Can’t wait.
Not really, many of the datacenters’ components can’t be used on PCs and many companies will go bankrupt (and won’t make more). If anything, PC parts will get a modest fall.
All I need and want are hard drives.
When I upgraded my desktop last January with all new everything I thought I was just getting ahead of tariffs…I did not foresee that memory and ssds and hdds and silicon would all explode in price. Glad I pulled the trigger when I did!
At this point my main PC is a ‘classic car’ of gaming. EVGA GTX 1070, z170 mobo, 64GB DDR4 RAM, i7 6700k.
First bitcoin made graphics cards double in price just when I was looking to upgrade my gfx, then a wider crypto wave, tarrifs, then a pandemic, then more tariffs, and then AI made everything rapidly wildly expensive.
My usual upgrade process of “waiting for prices to become reasonable around the 5-6 year mark” has proven to be a bad plan for this period…
I nicked myself a full PC upgrade in between pandemic and AI and couldn’t have been prouder about my timing. I was rocking a GTX 670 during the crypto craze just waiting for prices to normalise. Felt like I went from the stone age to the space age when I got my 7800xt.
My primary server though… That one was due for an upgrade this spring. It was my old gaming PC, so it has seen better days.
I’ve been waiting to update my SLI 1080s 32gb i7 from 2018 but with the new chip slots and DDR5 it only really makes sense to wholesale and build new. Now im down to a single 1080 I split the SLI off to build my wife a modest computer and because games dont really support SLI any more. Maybe i cant play new super heavy AAA games but have any of them not been shite lately?
I still play Helldivers 2 on this long-toothed beast, but I do have to live with a fairly low framerate and make sure I don’t leave too many processes open in the background (its a CPU intensive hodgepodge of a game engine). Most other newish games work fine in 1080p to be honest. I haven’t been keeping up with the latest and greatest either.
Modest framerate don’t bother me much because I’m from the era of 320x240 games.
Honestly an i7 6700, even the non K variant is still a really good experience for most things still. That’s what the main system I still use most is. Though it has an Overkill GPU in it. I just figured it was a good future proof investment. 9060xt
What were you using 64gb of ram for with that spec!? Sounds like you need someone to take 32gb of ram off your hands
Was running VMs for various learning courses etc for work.
It still runs about 80% nowadays with no VMs running and just with the amount of browser tabs and background shit I leave running.
Funny. I just gave away my desktop with that same chipset & CPU. It was a really good hardware generation.
No plans for a replacement in the near future.
I was planning on buying my wife a laptop so we can play games together. Not anymore.
I was also hoping to upgrade my RAM this year, but that’s definitely not happening now.
Honestly I probably just won’t be upgrading for another 5-7years.
Crazy how greed will drive off all business even after the price spike has come down.
The entire tech industry has signaled its intention to abandon the consumer market for wider profit margins in AI industries, and it’s really not possible to feel good about that as an informed consumer.
Nothing about this is positive. We can hope for a correction in policy, but really, it’s unlikely that we will ever see lower prices again. The future envisioned by the shareholders in these companies is the death of personal computing. Even if various AI markets fail, the vision remains: a future internet that is sterilized, information that is controlled, and personal computers that are glorified cable boxes.
Fight.
The only thing - the only thing - these fucking oligarchs care about is money. That’s it. Nothing else. Not even their own lives. Money is all. So deny it to them.
Buy used computer equipment. Never new. Stop using Google. Stop using Amazon. Definitely 100% stop using ChatGPT, Claude, or any other LLM. If you feel you have to use an AI model for some reason, save up and invest in a machine capable of running small models locally.
Make the AI companies bleed. And at the same time, reward other companies that do the right thing. That want to sell something other than dumb terminals with AI wired in.
I mean, fuck, there are plenty of companies that hate this shit too, because it destroys their businesses. Not their business models, their actual fucking businesses. No game developer or PC manufacturer is any happier with these AI monsters eating all the RAM than we are. They know if it persists it’ll put them out of business. It’s not like Dell or HP wanted to just stop being able to sell hardware.
Nvidia seem pretty gung-ho about it. They seem to think they can totally abandon the consumer market and it’ll never become a problem.
And that’s why I’m never buying a new NVIDIA device ever again. They get no money from me.
I would rather pay three times the price and own my hardware than pay for a cloud subscription service that will 100% get a price rise within a few years of coming online.
The only good thing about cloud gaming is it might finally convince various ISPs that they actually need to invest in infrastructure.
Microsoft and game devs facing the reality of having to do more with the same hardware rather than speed running hardware obsolescence.
