Glad I was able to build a new one a couple years ago. Sure wish I could afford a fucking hard drive though.
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.”
builds a new PC.
continues to play Half Life 2.
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.
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 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.
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.
“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.
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.
A hobby where 40% of people need a new fancy computer every 2 years is bad for the planet.
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.
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 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
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 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.
In the other 40% there’s the people that, like me, built a good future proof pc several years ago (mine is 10 years old) and it still plays what I like but it’s showing signs of aging. One day, it will stop working.
I’m just praying it holds up for a couple more years because otherwise I’m screwed.
I try to make it a habit to build a whole new machine when a new AMD socket to accommodate a major memory standard comes out. Way I figure, many people will dump their older hardware, so I can get a bargain on top-shelf stuff of the older standard. So when DDR6 is out, I pick up a 1024gb of DDR5 and a Threadripper of the generation.
While I don’t like the FOMO from not adopting the latest platform, my wallet much appreciates the mercy.
I’m at 14 years, with one gpu upgrade to a 970, and I’m just here sacrificing to any god out there at this point. I’ve become pretty comfortable with indie games, and even a few well optimized games (elden ring, for example, runs pretty well), but when my friends just jumped into subnautica 2, that was a big :(
We sold our last desktop before doing a huge move and bought a temp laptop. Now we’re unable to get a desktop because of pricing. Our last desktop cost about 750usd to build and it was pretty good specs for the time. Now the same parts would be 1500… bruh and we wanted to upgrade the whole system… seems like we’ll have to make our temporary laptop semi permanent
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.
My big computer is knackered. It’s about 10 years old now and properly starting to chug on even the newer indy games I like. But with a 16 month old toddler in the house and a crunch on cost of living upgrading I have nothing to spare on a new computer especially how much components are costing these days.
