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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.
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
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
The vast majority of the market is made by only three companies who all have dramatically raised prices. Sk Hynix, Samsung and Micron.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
Glad I was able to build a new one a couple years ago. Sure wish I could afford a fucking hard drive though.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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 :(
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.
