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When the AI shit flops and when it does bursts… there will pc parts for everyone!! Can’t wait.
My 1080ti’s retirement has been indefinitely postponed.
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!
W>hy build a new PC when you can invest in a used one that is actually likely better? No overpriced components. No unnecessary features. No Copilot key. And probably you won’t have to fight for the RAM, what datacenter wants a DDR3 anyway? Ditto the hard drive. Install Linux , be happy.
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…
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.
Just going to work on my game log as well to stay away from newer games and the temptation to upgrade.
I’m in the games industry and I can tell you first-hand nobody is making games targetting future hardware right now.
The pattern used to be to optimise assuming your current average hardware would be minspec by the time your game came out. That’s no longer true and everyone knows it.
If you pick up a used 3060, you’ll have a solid gaming PC for many years to come.
40% seem to have disposable income to be able to afford a decent build at today’s prices. I couldn’t.
It’s not always about if one COULD. I could, but I’m also a cheapskate. And these prices are neither fair nor fun. It’s just greed. So fuck them until prices go down again. If ever.
I will only upgrade if the current things catches fire or eats my food.
Yeah, even with my disposable income, I don’t dispose of it indiscriminately. I try to get maximum value out of my fun.
Exactly. Bang-for-bucks-ratio must be good or i’m not interested. No matter how much i want it or how much money i could throw at it.
I could afford to build a new PC if I completely depleted my “fun things” saving account, but it’s not worth it because for the price of a mid-range gaming rig I could probably buy a private island.
That’s the wealth inequality.
Be an interesting rabbit hole to investigate. 40% seems high for people to afford boutique building at retail component prices.
You’d need to find out what % of the population would build a PC, how education influences that number, how wealth influences that education, and whatever else.
Probably less than 1% of the population would fit in that actual number of people willing and able to buy and build at current pricing.
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.
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.
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.
I’m really glad that me and my friends decided to build new PCs the second we saw the first rise in RAM prices. It would have been hard to survive this on our 7-10 years old builds.
I mean why build a pc with specs that I could have had years ago for the same price.
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.
40% of gamers: cause I didn’t build it those years ago
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
I’m afraid they can continue artificially inflating their value longer than my PC will last…
Yeah, the hope isn’t dead.
Dont worry, we gotta wait just two more decades and prices will drop.
“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.
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…
What were you using 64gb of ram for with that spec!? Sounds like you need someone to take 32gb of ram off your hands
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
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.
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.
So 40% do? I feel like 40% of a population building a new PC every 2 years is very significant
I got really lucky. I bought my PC between the crypto crash, right before the AI uprising.
Buying from Costco is still relatively decent.
It’s a pretty weak argument using a metric without historical numbers then claiming it means something.
It seems reasonable less people would be building a rig with the price crunch, but that survey and this article isn’t making much of a case for the argument besides emotional appeal
If on average a PC gamer build a PC every 5 years (which, IMO, is enough), then roughly 60% will have a PC new enough that they won’t plan to build one in the next two years
Correct, utterly useless. But people take the bait, look at the response even here on far above critical Lemmy users.
