This is insane. We've built our apps and websites to require ungodly amounts of memory and now AI scrapes away said websites while pricing us out.
Fast apps and websites need to make a comeback.
The exact same sticks/model #’s of RAM cost $200 last year, now costs $950. I don’t remember existing CPU’s ever going up in price by 5x (300-400% increases).
Now they're worth over half as much as the whole machine.
"Price tracking courtesy of PCPartPicker now reveals the cheapest 32GB DDR5 RAM you can buy is $375. Specifically, four XPOWER kits from Silicon Power will set you back $374.97 thanks to a promo code."
its paired to a 5950x so im sure it will be fine for a few more years
That said, getting hold of them was hard and needed a special order.
The question is to buy or wait.
This is the stupidest freaking timeline...
Boy do I ever regret that. Every time I compile some code and the VM I use goes OOM, I die a little bit inside knowing that less than 100 bucks or so would have fixed this if I just went for it.
Like clockwork, people naturally want to have their cake and to eat it too, so there will be the incessant complaining about the externalities. Half the people lack the brainpower to see the good and bad are intrinsically linked, and the other half just like complaining.
But at least for now, both halves aren't pulling back (in fact it's increasing), and money, not complaining, steers the ship.
Can you elaborate? Leaded gasoline is estimated to have contributed to the deaths of like tens (hundreds?) of millions of people. Asbestos probably millions.
Why would high RAM prices be remembered alongside these events?
Well... I guess William Gibson laughs last, after all!
Usually these bottlenecks lead to a price crash later. Of course that’s also part of what fuels the bottleneck. Companies are afraid of over investing in production and being left with underwater capital later.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-02/sk-hynix-...
I bought it for 82 EUR, before the whole ongoing situation.
Now the same spec costs upwards of 290 EUR, about 3.5x the original price and even on Amazon the best prices I can find are upwards of like 210 EUR (2.5x).
If you're building your own PC, your best bet is to buy a bundle. If you happen to be lucky enough to live near a Micro Center (they don't deliver), then you have good options [2]. Newegg does too.
Prebuilts get a bad rep and it's not really justified. That Walmart PC is ABS. That's Newegg, basically. I'm sorry but you just can't buy that parts list for $!900. The idea that there is a $1000 premium for a prebuilt is just not true. Alos, I hear people say "it only takes an hour to build a PC". No, it doesn't. Maybe if you've built 20 PCs it does but if you don't do it regularly, it's a massive pain. Years ago I used to do this. I'm too old and the novelty has worn off. I don't want to diagnose if I've gotten my motherboard headers right or why my fans aren't spinning up or why my PC isn't POSTing or even just getting the cabling right, etc etc etc.
But yes, if you're just buying RAM by itself the situation is horrific. If you can live with a 32GB gaming PC, there are options that are relatively comparable to what you could get a year ago. If you want 64GB+ of RAM, that's going to bite.
[1]: https://www.walmart.com/ip/ABS-Eurus-Ruby-Gaming-PC-Windows-...
[2]: https://www.microcenter.com/site/content/bundle-and-save.asp...
[1] https://tweakers.net/pricewatch/1419292/corsair-vengeance-lp...
Looking at it from that frame, it seems reasonable.
I thought 128MB of SDRAM was a good deal at $100.
I also thought $479 for 32GB of DDR4 was nuts back in 2016/2017.
That makes me realize how much of society, economics and our nature is really like a current, ripples in a big ol ocean. Supply and demand baby.
But then again I remember spending hundreds of dollars as a high school student to upgrade my family's 8Mb desktop to 40 Mb.
It's not that bad, at least by recent standards, but the problem is that there's no such thing as "price per Gb." If you need 512 Gb you will not be buying 16 Gb DIMMs to get it. More likely you'll be buying 64 Gb ECC sticks, and those are much pricier.
I'm at least happy I went for DDR4 RAM when I was building this server.
I built in February 2025, and my two 48GB DIMMs were $440. Last month I checked and they were $1800 if you could even find them still in stock.
For my workloads it was like getting 2 - 2.5 more CPU cores worth of performance, so it was worth it, since the CPU was already as beefy as it could be. It was a reasonable premium then. Today? I’m not sure the math would still math.
Same thing with GPUs, is kind of insane having so much processing power and yet requiring more and more. What purpose for? What's the limit? Does it really really pay off such investments?
For me as a non-AI developer (I don't use any models of any kind, nor I train LLMs at all), a system with 16Gb seems to be more than enough for a vast number of applications.
I have a 48GB development machine which is nice if you are running IDEs, backend stuff via docker, etc. And even just having a bunch of RAM there for file caching helps keep things fast.
I think people who need more than 16GB of RAM are power users with higher memory requirements, such as those using local LLMs, those who frequently use virtualization, and people doing tasks such as video editing.
Now some will bill Taiwan and Korea the same way they bill consumers and industries when they need RAM, should they need us.
Chinese companies were at least producing more and more to brace for restrictions from western manufacturers
There certainly is lots and lots of potential.
For the record I'm leading the AI program at my company and am very vested in the positive side. But one can also be aware there are downsides, more so than complaining.
It's impossible to avoid using AI multiple times a day, just because it's forced into every product under the sun.
That is NOT demand. None of those users WANT this.
The fact is there are people that do in fact want this, and it isn't just CEO's hoping to cut jobs.
If the vendors decide that free (ad-supported) use is necessary to keep demand, we will be entering a new era of surveillance capitalism instead.
Claiming people want this is like claiming that people wanted WW2 because look we're all enjoying the tech that was developed during it!
Real AI is a geo-political threat, and will not be allowed to exist for the average person. So, enjoy your toy AI models, because that's all you're getting.
Though I do agree that most people probably don't want as much AI as is being shoved on us right now, there is a subset that do want at least some of it.
More my point, yeah I think there is an issue of the actual demand being extremely over estimated due to shady practices (like of course Gemini gets a lot of use when every single google search calls it whether you want it or not). But we also should not be so quick to disregard there being real demand just to hope for the outcome we want.
I talk to my Uber driver whenever I'm visiting somewhere, and yes, some of them are actually excited about AI.
It's gotten to the point where nvidia doesn't even bother to report their gaming revenue anymore. It's a clear sign that we're back to the bad old days of pc gaming being a 'prosumer' hobby, but don't worry I'm sure nvidia and their ilk are salivating at the idea of making pc gaming into a streaming stadia like solution that you pay for monthly
I was thinking of upgrading the video card to something better, but looking at the cost of replacing that Quadro? I might just stay put for now. Costs on those have also pretty much doubled.
I had it all priced out, but a bunch of birthdays in my family were coming up and I felt like I shouldn't buy something for myself if it's really their time.
My old laptop will have to cut it for a while. :-)
Spec-ing and buying servers has become quite the pain in the past year, at least at the relatively-small scale we operate at. It's "dynamic pricing" with most quotes being valid for 24 hours :(
Is supply actively constrained, or is this mostly in anticipation of future shortages? How much of this is a mix of panic buying and price gouging on bad news?
I care more about the secondhand market. Prices are nuts for old used gear, but that also tracks with patterns I've been seeing since roughly the pandemic where more and more secondhand sellers on the usual platforms setting pricing patterns are small businesses, not hobbyists.
When I bought the same ECC DDR4 16gb ram stick in 2016 (when DDR4 was rather new) it cost $85 (cant remember if it was new or used)
$86.30 for my 32gb DDR4 3200 stick Oct 2022. So glad I bought that. I have a mini-itx board and one of the ram slots died so i was forced to upgrade to a single stick. the historic trend of price deflation in computer components has always had me leaning toward not upgrading my set up.
fortunately all i play now are "premium" web browser games like narrow.one and eggball, ha! going to be hurting when GTA 6 launches with my 3050/1070 gpus...
Right now the biggest threat to their IPO's is that people realize that local models are good enough for whatever they're peddling, what's the most important factor to even running good enough models? RAM since you want the models in memory to not be total slogs.
Steam Deck had a huge price increase (~40-50%) but it still sold out in 24 hours.
All it would take is for everyone not to pull the trigger on buying things for a little bit and prices would fall but instead enough people are buying things at a crazy markup. If anything that's a signal to sell things at higher prices. Of course AI is amplifying this problem but realistically people are still buying consumer hardware at these prices which lets businesses know people will pay this price.
I'm on a machine built from parts in 2014 and it's all very good for me to do every day development so I'm not posting this from a machine I won't have to touch for another 10 years.
I pulled the trigger on an early Ayn Thor because it was obvious this was going to happen. Something I didn't really want to fit into my budget but knew that if I didn't I would regret it later.
Implicitly, but that's blaming the consumer who has no or few equivalent choices. Purchasing RAM is not like choosing between Coke and Pepsi. A better analogy is that when a hurricane is coming or a natural disaster has already hit, it doesn't help that people will purchase food and fuel at any price.
- Altman, a.k.a. Dory from Finding Nemo and/or Dario, a.k.a. Carl from Jimmy Neutron.
I wanted to upgrade my SSD but prices are more than at the end of 2025. I refuse to pay 500 euro for a 4TB SSD. I rather go outside and play with my bike like when I was 5.
And if you're wondering, who's throwing out DDR5 systems? A local healthcare company. The boxes for some units are crushed and have water stains on them, and I imagine others don't meet their exacting requirements in some minor way (though they look and work OK to me, regardless of scratches and dings on the case).
Some people need to buy at these inflated prices anyway, and are ultimately willing to spend. Maybe it differs in your area but there's no risk in listing these on Facebook Marketplace or similar platforms and see the interest.
i5-13500E, 32GB DDR5, 512 GB NVMe, scratched and dinged a bit for $500 is practically a steal! Hardly anyone's biting or clicking, I don't get it...
New open box models (not scratched and dinged), if anyone's interested: https://www.ebay.com/itm/188355326179
Edit: they're intended to be retail POS PCs, like cash registers. (The motherboard literally has a header for a cash drawer!) So unless you're a particular kind of retailer, you're not asking your distributor for them. If distributors aren't looking for them, our B2B buyers aren't buying them. If they were Elite/Prodesks, Optiplexes, or Thinkcenters, they'd probably be gone by now.
I have no idea why a weather forecast site needs tens of megabytes of resources, and gig+ of ram for my browser, since i get no more info from it, than i did back then. Same for chat programs (how is discord different than irc? and why does it need so much ram to do so? same for slack), mail clients, etc.
Maybe it's time to kick developers to start optimizing stuff a bit, since neither they nor the users can't afford "unlimited" ram anymore.
edit: i'm not saying we need to get back to literally 32 megs of ram, just to make developers performance test their stuff on a laptop that was on sale 3 years ago in their local supermarket, i.e. stuff their users use at home.
weather forecast wasn't more rainy on a 2005 windows PC or an early smartphone in 2G to save battery
FHD streaming has worked for decades now
The plot of animes was still enjoyable on DVD
Progress is important, but some companies don't realise how customers don't need it when it's twice their pay
A 2x32GB DDR5 kit I paid $150 for 11 months ago costs $910 today from the same retailer. A 2x16GB DRR4 kit that was $105 last year is now $230.
The RAM alone in my newest machine would sell for over double what I paid for the entire machine one year ago.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BJ7X9P1W
Consumers need to start playing legal warfare against the companies for openly distorting the market. The ramifications will only hurt us and there needs to be a true comeuppance.
I am annoyed that the new handhelds are all crazy so sticking with my Legion Go for now.
The one I am annoyed with is storage. I desperately need to get a couple new drives for my NAS (one to replace one that its bad sectors are growing and one to add more storage) and I am not looking forward to spending $600-$700 each for 20TB drives.
Been solid so far for 6-ish months.
https://www.amazon.com/Crucial-6000MHz-Overclocking-Desktop-...
That's about 50% higher than you'd pay for retail, small quantity, off the shelf alternatives in the US.
Many vendors have limited allocation so they're sending out extremely high quotes to see who will take it. They know everyone is seeing news about high RAM prices and getting new vendors approved can be hard, so they raise prices and see who takes it.
I would recommend getting quotes from multiple vendors. Don't be afraid to push back. They might come back immediately with a lower price in this market. Also check the retail suppliers you can access in your country.
> Quotes came back to about €200k for 48 x 96GB DDR5-5600 RDIMMs.
That's around EUR 40 per GB? That seems quite high compared to what consumer DDR5 RAM is selling for, though it being RDIMM may account for some of the difference.
Quotes are 7 days max, lead times fluctuating out months, and often now have language they can choose to not honor the quote for any reason due to price fluctuations.
When it comes to server RAM, I got quoted double a previous quote within the span of a week.
Buying servers is basically quote roulette now.
I sell used RAM in trays of 50 sticks (I physically know how much that is, I've held that many). I've had some trays sell for a few thousand dollars. Six figures for just one tray is absurd, but I've never collected enough DDR5 to make a full tray.
The only hope here is China floods the market which would be a good or bad thing however you look at it.
It is hard to overstate the damage that the infinite money being poured into AI is doing to the wider economy. Anything involved in datacenters is going to experience shortages/price rises. A pre-existing problem is power transformers: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-power-transformer...
The impact on domestic electricity prices in a year just after high oil prices is not going to be popular either.
I get what you're saying but medium term this is an extremely funny sentiment. This money being poured is likely to end up being a huge boon for a lot of economic sectors, including in the US. Most commodity shortages like this end in a glut, with a medium term win for consumers, even if we have 1-2 (more) years of pricing pain. Meanwhile expensive RAM has so far left stock for people that really need it. Calling this kind of demand economic damage is odd.
I know it's an unpopular opinion on Hacker News but I think most people are overstating the damage to the economy. Increased demand starts to pull more advancements forward and increase spending on production, which benefits everyone.
Transformer demand is real, but what percentage of your electricity bill do you think goes to spending on those transformers? The number is so small that it's a rounding error. Many examples like this where we see headlines about some part going up in price and forget that it's such a negligible piece of our bill that it barely matters.
The cost of fuel inputs for base generation and peak supply are a bigger factor.
Both. AI datacenters create immense demand on DRAM, NAND storage, even HDD storage.
Then Sam Altman went ahead and "bought" 40% of the world's DRAM production, by way of secretly approaching both Samsung and SK Hynix (each unaware of the other getting a similar deal), which sent the entire market into a panic and everyone rushed to buy ahead of the anticipated supply shortage.
The kicker is that it wasn't even a proper purchase agreement. Just a non-binding promise of "By 2030 I will have infinite dollars and buy your DRAM".
Surely it is a more efficient use of DRAM to run inference on shared hardware with large batch sizes and more utilization.
Because what to do with power-consuming outdated hardware ? let's say 5 years from now ?
They will need new RAM.
I wonder.
Right now the biggest threat to their IPO's is that people realize that local models are good enough for whatever they're peddling...
...plus the recent price increases by AI companies, made me actually think the opposite: that there might be another additional "run" for memory and/or GPUs.
Therefore, yesterday I decided to order an additional RTX 5060 with 16 GiB VRAM for the ~500$ that I saved during the last months (to be added to the RTX 5070 12 GiB that I bought last year to play games in 4k + my old RTX 3060 12 GiB which I recycled a few months ago after noticing how nice it is to run llama.cpp locally without having to worry about subscription costs).
The original 24 GiB VRAM were actually quite enough for some of the stuff that I do (e.g. transcribe text of image scans of old magazines, coding with Aider, etc - I usually use Q5_K_M quantizations of Qwen & Gemma by Bartowski as lower ones delivered sometimes weird results and/or looped forever in "thinking"-mode), but I guess that with 40 GiB I should be bullet-proof for my pessimistic view of our future :o)
they are not. Unless you are satisfied with plausible, but mostly garbage output.
For non-coding work, they are more than good enough. A lot of the ways my non-technical family members have interacted with AI would be perfectly served by using a local model.
After all, people were more than satisfied with the results from GPT 3. That has long since been surpassed by open weight models.
Would be nice to be able to own property.
Anyway, I just can't find a reason to build an AM4 PC even though the RAM is "free". It's just not worth it. If you need 64GB+ of RAM and the DDR4 vs DDR5 difference isn't significant to you then maybe it's worth it. Otherwise, you can still buy a 32GB DDR5 PC for similar prices to last year sometimes. It's not worth buying any AM4 CPU then the 7500X3D/7600X3D/7800X3D are so much better for the same price.
The 5800X3D re-release is kinda funny. AMD claims they had to do significant re-engineering but it is my understanding they stopped selling it in the US but were still selling it overseas. So did production really stop? Anyway, the price seems to be $349. If so, that's completely not worth it. It's the same price as the 7800X#D, which is significantly better.
As an example, here's a 7800X3D + motherboard + 32GB DDR5 bundle you can buy today for $629 if you happen to live near a Micro Center [1]. No AM4 option is going to compete with that, particularly not with a $349 CPU.
[1]: https://www.microcenter.com/product/5007391/amd-ryzen-7-7800...
The 5700X3D has been the smarter pick back then, it fits to the current latent user hostility of AMD to focus on the more expensive processor.
AI bros are building something fantastic, but let's not forget that value isn't necessarily brought by sheer prices
It will happen, but yeah it takes time and money
This is similar situation to housing market. Prices are going up and supply is being restricted by whatever means.
It will be a bit of Catch 22.
Very lucky me!
I’d even get a house with a garage or something just for that.
Ten years from now I'll get to watch inception in 4K.
When I was trying to upgrade to Windows 11 from Windows 10 I got the same warning. It is the reason why I'm now happily running Xubuntu on the same machine.
I did end up installing a Windows 11 VM (VirtualBox) which works perfectly fine running as a guest under Xubuntu on a 4790k (screw you Microsoft). But I otherwise never want go back to Windows as a daily driver. The enshittification just got too much for me.
Except, Chinese firms have entered the market now to capture the public market while the "top tier" firms supply AI firms. If the AI firms stops buying everything the toptier firms will come back into a market that has begun to be overrun by cheaper Chinese alternatives. It could get damn bloody (but good for consumers).
You really need to get your eyes checked.
It's also quite nice to actually hit 165 fps in some less demanding games on my 165 hz monitor.
I've personally never found Ray Tracing to be worth the performance impact. I have a 3090 and a 7900 XT at home, on different computers. When opening a new game, I just keep everything on Medium, turn RT off if possible, and enjoy good fps at 4K in most games.
Doom The Dark Ages was the only one that didn't perform as well as I'd like. Still, perfectly playable at 1080p, Medium settings, targeting 120+ fps.
And given how much of stock prices these days is purely dependent on stock traders believing they'll be able to sell those stocks on to some Greater Fool later, rather than based on the reality of the company the stock is about...well, they can keep the ball in the air for quite a while.
Personally, I suspect that the primary trigger for the big selloff is going to be the upcoming IPOs. Bigwigs get their big bucks, cash out, and leave everyone else holding the bag.
But if any of us knew when events like those were going to happen, we'd probably be rich from that already, hm?
The only thing I've found that's annoying with these POS/Office builds across various brands and models from 2013-2017 is the PSUs are less reliable and end up failing if you're doing more than just running excel and outlook. The OEM PSUs are often priced at ~25-70% of the value of the entire machine. I've seen some people end up cutting a hole in the case and bolt an ATX PSU to the exterior.
Edit: Pittsburgh
Demand will only go down if people reduce their use of these AI tools. Given how much folks here complain about quotas, I'm very skeptical that will happen willingly.
In a constrained market, supply and demand favors folks who can most efficiently extract rent. Local models only make sense in a world with abundant compute and energy.
It's not just about the price of transformers (which have gone up!), lead times have gone up too - any infrastructure project involving transformers will be delayed by varying amounts - including grid-connected solar, at a time when energy prices are going insane.
Let's say you're an alchemist living in ancient China. You discover some kind of strange material made out of melted sand and want to sell some of it as a drinking vessel. One problem: everyone already uses porcelain for that purpose, which holds hot drinks without cracking like your strange sand ones do. So you toss that in the trash and move onto the next attempt at making an elixir of life.
Problem is, what you invented was a kind of glass; which has no economic niche in the society you live in. Some funny other places in the far west might invent it, though - hell, they might even figure out that you can grind this material down into lenses and discover an entire field of magic - optics - that you discarded because nobody needed tea cups that crack when you put tea in them.
Now, let's say you live in a society that has access to some kind of artificial intelligence. You are going to chuck the AI at absolutely everything, because on average, it tends to be better at all the problems you throw at it. Even simple things like spell-checkers get turned into AI invocations because, well, the Bitter Lesson dictates that having enough compute and learning to throw at the problem will always yield a better result than hard-coded nonsense logic that demos well. And even if you want to, well, you couldn't afford the RAM to run modern vibe-coded slop software anyway. Porcelain crowds out investment in glass, and as a result, we are limited to only having technologies that can be made by or from a pile of stolen books tied together with a bunch of matrix multiplies.
There are two issues... one being that an economy needs people to buy things to work, and people only can buy things if they have money, and people only have money when they have work - but everyone is laying off people left and right due to "AI".
The other issue is that there's trillions of dollars floating around between all the companies. It is likely that a significant chunk of these will fail and give us another 2007.
I'd say local models are fairly capable of even somewhat complex coding execution. For complex non-coding work (research, in-depth analysis, assembly of complex info-dense documents) I'd rather do it by hand than switch from Opus 4.7 to anything I could even theoretically run locally.
Punishing instead of supporting.
Using red tape as some kind of prophylactic is ridiculous. If the state doesn't have the monitoring in place, you have to just trust the company, which is naive if not negligent. If you do have the monitoring, why require the extremely expensive song & dance? To protect corporations from negligently wasting money?
Answer: because the song & dance is primarily about extracting concessions, like union labor or even cash (e.g. promises to pay to fix someone else's pollution, or contributions to various interest groups). The friction and expense involved in today's development review processes are many times more costly to all involved than the social benefit.
That's hopelessly naïve.
If you let them build the facility that can pollute, they're going to pollute.
And if you point to the pollution coming out and tell them "you have to stop," they're going to say "make us."
And if you point to the pollution already in the environment and tell them "you have to clean that up, because you put it there," they're going to say "prove it."
And they're going to tie the government up in court for years or decades, and then oh, whoops, somehow the entity that actually did all the polluting has no more money and can't do anything about it :-( Good thing they were only a subsidiary that all the profit and assets can be moved out of!
And the people who actually live there are suffering from preventable diseases and dying of cancer at rates 5x the national average.
How do I know all this? Because this has been industry's playbook for over a century.
But even so, how does the song & dance prevent any of that? It's not like, e.g., a battery manufacturer submits a plan admitting that they're gonna dump stuff.
Might be true but it’s hard to take that argument in good faith at this point.
The 3 RAM manufactures know this too, from painful experience. There won't be a glut this cycle because there are no capacity build-outs. Instead of increasing capacity, some OEMs left the consumer segment to focus on enterprise AI.
> Calling this kind of demand economic damage is odd.
It's not odd at all because the complementary industries are being damaged - possibly permanently: manufacturers of motherboard, cases, fans, and the entire consumer PC supply chain are being negatively impacted. Expect bankruptcies and consolidation if this lasts for 2 more years.
Sentiment is the right word here. None of us really know, and go by feeling. If you perceive the AI boom as approaching tulip craze levels of irrationality, it feels pretty dire.
The RAM is a commodity and may be repurposed afterward. This kind of thing is a bit like a debt jubilee when the dust clears and survivors scavenge the dead. But a lot of other build-out may essentially be waste. To me, apologists for this boom seem to be harboring a variant of the broken windows fallacy. Not all economic activity is productive.
The other kind of damage is opportunity cost. How many players in other industries are being strategically harmed by this situation? We can't all just live on AI token output if these other industries retract too far.
No such thing as a free lunch. Whilst a lot of industries are doing extremely well right now (i.e. everything involved in datacenter construction), everyone else has to actually pay for it.
Therein also lies the damage; The economy wasn't doing so great to begin with, and now this massive multi-trillion-dollar expense has been added.
The direct expenses come out of the pockets of Big Tech, but all the indirect stuff like the DRAM crisis affect the wider economy directly.
Smaller businesses in particular - not so long past the COVID disruption and already facing significant challenges in areas like logistics and energy supply costs - will not necessarily have the reserves that older and larger businesses often do to withstand another multi-year price shock.
There's smaller businesses that I know _need_ data capacity (hard drives) that can't afford them and are facing serious CAPEX challenges.
I work for a start up that helps folks move off of existing on-prem virtualization solutions and every small to medium company across every sector you can think of aren't just able to not afford additional storage and memory, they can't find them either.
There isn't as much stock as you think. I can't wait for this AI bubble to pop. It's been absolutely terrible for 90% of the industry.
The evidence coming out is saying otherwise.
I think I paid a total of around $5,500 for the current components of my PC. Hard to say for sure since my PC has been a Ship of Theseus for over 30 years and started as a 486. The link merely reflects its current state.
At one point, PCPartPicker was showing my PC as worth $11,000. It's now at $7,200 without including the RAM or PSU. That would put it at $9,000.
> It's a clear sign that we're back to the bad old days of pc gaming being a 'prosumer' hobby
Yup.
I think it's especially bad since the gap between budget-grade and mid-grade feels like it's gotten wide. If you wanna play the latest AAA games and not feel like you need to upgrade in 3 years, you can't settle for the budget grade unless you're still gaming at 1080p.
I wouldn't recommend spending under $3,000 for a gaming PC these days, and that's just an absurd price.
You can get a $200 to $300 microcenter cpu+motherboard+16GB DDR5 bundle [1], then $300-$400 GPU, and you'll be able to play nearly every game on the market just fine at 1080p.
I'm sure there are pre-builts using stockpiled RAM that are similar $1000 price range.
And if you buy used you can do even better. $300-400 might get you a 5060 or a 9060XT right now [2][3] but if you go used you can get something like a 3080 instead.
I play games at 1080p with a 1660 Ti and, outside of some newer UE5 games that heavily rely on frame gen for performance (Monster Hunter Wilds performance was too poor to play), everything I've thrown at it has been playable and some games even 100+ FPS.
[1] https://www.microcenter.com/site/content/bundle-and-save.asp...
[2] https://pcpartpicker.com/products/video-card/#c=594,593&sort...
[3] https://pcpartpicker.com/products/video-card/#c=596&sort=pri...
Hard disagree. Once I went 4K, I could never go back to 1080p.
Sure, in an action-packed scenes of close- to moderate-quarters combat, I don't really notice it.
But in long-distance combat? Having 4x the pixels per square inch is noticeable. In slower scenes and cut scenes it's definitely an appreciable improvement.
Yeah. 4K is nice for text, but doesn't seem like a great deal for gaming given the 4x hardware requirement and/or weirdo interpolation technologies that may or may not work on AMD + Linux anyway.
Alternative wording: You recommend to spend more than $3000? There are people out there who don't toss money around as if it's an endless commodity. I spent a friction of that for gaming computers in my entire life.
I think modern rendering techniques need more pixels. 1440p should be considered bare minimum, and 4K the norm. Unfortunately, the prices are what they are.
On the flipside, being a low-spec gamer is better than ever. Indies, oldies, mods... all in great shape.
Yes.
The most I've ever replaced all at once is the CPU/mobo/RAM trifecta. But even when I do that, I still kept the same storage, case, GPU, PSU, mouse/keyboard, etc.
But otherwise, upgrades are piecemeal. New storage when my current storage is full or I want to upgrade to a new technology. New GPU when I feel like my current one is holding me back. New mouse or keyboard when my current one starts failing. The CPU/mobo/RAM trifecta when the performance gains make it worthwhile, which at this point is about every 5 years.
I'm not sure why this is hard to believe.
As much as I hate to say it, the move at this point is GeForce Now, at least for the time being... I just subscribed to the 200 USD/year Ultimate plan with a free 007 game. My ping to the datacenter is a mere 5ms, with 5080, RTX, 4k@60Hz (which my projector can drive) I am getting way more performance and similar latency than I would if I were using my own, semi-affordable rig or even a PS5. It's mind-blowing, really, and I recommend anyone to at least give it a try.
If I take out the cost of that 007 game, that plan i 140 USD a year. If you consider the cost of the electricity, it alone would likely cover it. In the past one would typically include hardware depreciation cost in such calculations to drive the point home...but the 3-4k USD I am not spending spending on a similar rig alone can generate me some 100-150 USD in bank over a year – not to mention the inflation! So, all in all, it's basically free, comparatively speaking.
At home, I am still rocking a plain old GTX 1080 with an i7 6700k, it's still kicking ass a decade later and plays most of what I throw at it, and I have an M-Series MBP for work, though it's capable of running plenty modern titles on Ultra.
My Steam Deck absorbs the majority of my local gaming, however, even though I have to run games at lower spec. It's just an extremely convenient device and I dock it to my projector, which I run at 1080p@240Hz anyway because I prefer it over 4K@60Hz.
For things the deck can't handle though, GeForce Now rocks. If the Steam Machine doesn't become too expensive, I might snag one and a Steam Frame headset as well, and that will probably have me set through any impending breakdown in the supply chain for at least a decade. I'll probably be rocking this GTX 1080 until 2040, the way things are going.
Also, gaming does not equal computer ownership. Majority of gamers use consoles, anyway. Gaming PCs are niche nowadays.
But yeah, you need a fiber.
It raises the stakes, Obviously they can still cheat but now it's a matter of criminal negligence not civil law.
The maxim, "a nation of laws, not of men", is applicable here. If you don't have fixed goal posts or rules, governance becomes chaotic, not to mention unjust, inefficient, and ultimately corrupt (so many people like Trump because he promises to substitute his own judgement in place of democratic processes).
It would be nice if we could comprehensively hypothesis and address every possible manner in which things could wrong, but we can't. Most of the time you need to rely on broad rules, at least as a catchall, like don't harm someone or don't pollute, and ensure fast, consistent, and efficient accountability when injuries occur. The current state of development approval has become grossly degenerate in many places. In others it could definitely use some firming up. But let's not pretend that a project in California would get away with most of the stuff they can in Louisiana just because we reformed the review process. For one thing, California is much better about enforcing existing hazard codes at both the planning approval and operational stages.
Doom: The Dark Ages is 1440p and still looks great.
Total waste of money paying so much more for a gpu unless you want local ai, and those weirdo interpolation technologies are a pain in the a* to get working.
My point. Once you get better things yes it's easy to think you could never use the lesser tools you once had. But if the incentives are there, it's really not that difficult to adapt.
Basically the same specs here. 4K, 27".
How often were you traveling with it? I go to a PC gaming event twice/year (PDXLAN) and bring it. I don't think it's that bad moving it to the event venue and back.
> Once you get better things yes it's easy to think you could never use the lesser tools you once had.
You're probably right.
CS 1.5, OpenTTD, AoE2, the likes..
Fancier graphics doesn't make games better. Gameplay, stories and jokes do.
Examples: Cyberpunk 2077 (Once all the bugs were worked out, I recognize it was dogshit on release), Baldur's Gate 3, Expedition 33. Would they be great games even with 15-year old graphical fidelity? Sure. But the stunning graphics definitely elevates the experience, especially in the case of Cyberpunk 2077. When you have the hardware to run everything maxed out, it's damn nearly photographic. It made me truly feel immersed in the game world in a way no other game has achieved, and I've played lots of VR games.
I guess most would probably assume at least one epic refresh where there wasn't really anything carried across except maybe the parking spot on your desk. And since the 486 era, most probably expect your desk and/or physical site changed too.
There were so many potential PC era boundaries like case and motherboard form factors, external peripheral buses, HDD controller types, expansion card buses, cooling and PSU demands, socket/RAM formats, display types, and display connection types, ...
So many opportunities to think, "this seems like a time for a clean slate." If for no other reason than to bring up the new computer and have the old continue in transition or as some kind of spare, backup, or hand-me-down.
Only one change really from AT/Baby AT to ATX. We've been on ATX now for 30 years. I could grab an A-Bit BH6 motherboard from 1998 and put it in my modern Hyte Y60 case if I wanted to.
> external peripheral buses
Since we're talking starting from 486 era, that only means going from PS/2 to USB for keyboard/mouse, parallel port for your printer, maybe serial port for a modem. During the transition period, adapters were cheap and common.
> HDD controller types, [..], display connection types.
I don't know about the ESDI to IDE transition, but I know from IDE/PATA to SATA there was a period where motherboards had both. During the transition from VGA to DVI, then DVI to DisplayPort, GPUs had both.
> cooling and PSU demands
If you overbuy on the PSU a little, you can get a ton of futureproofing. CPUs came with stock coolers until just a few years ago.
> socket/RAM formats
Which is why the CPU/mobo/RAM upgrade was typically done as a trifecta.
> So many opportunities to think, "this seems like a time for a clean slate."
Never felt the need. As mentioned above, there was frequently a transition period for when hardware supported both old and new tech.
But it would have been much cooler if you were still on the 486 era case :D
ESDI and ST-506 MFM/RLL before it lived in universe of dedicated HDD interface cards.
The buses I was thinking of included ISA, EISA, VLB, PCI, PCIe. Yes there were ways to carry some things across since motherboards often had a couple bus types at once. But in my experience, the older peripheral cards often just got retired as they became either obsolete concepts or totally integrated in the next motherboard. I.e. you once commonly had serial port and parallel port expansion cards, game controller cards, sound cards, disk controller cards, and basic 2D graphics cards.
Cases also got smaller because the motherboards needed less space, people needed fewer expansion cards, and also because people needed fewer and fewer "drive bays". In the early days, you saw both 5.25" and 3.5" floppy drives, CD-ROM drives, big chunky HDDs, and possibly other weird removable media drives. Now you can easily have a capable corporate-style PC with no expansion cards, and no drives other than the M.2 stuck into the motherboard.
On the external side, I can think of PS/2, serial, parallel, USB, external SCSI, Firewire, e-SATA. Some of these coexisted with USB until it became high speed enough to subsume them. With graphics there was VGA, composite video, DVI, DisplayPort. Sound had 3.5mm, coax, toslink, coax digital. Communications commonly had POTS modem, coax ethernet, twisted pair ethernet. Somewhat esoteric were WiFi and bluetooth adapters. These could be on dedicated expansion cards, integrated into sound/graphics/comms cards, or integrated into the motherboard.
There were also weird expansion cards that paired with a particular external device, like a scanner or Hercules monochrome monitor. And more unusual cards like video-capture and digital TV or radio tuners.
The PSU issue wasn't just overall wattage but different set or balance of voltage rails and kinds of internal connectors needed for powered components. And shifts like standby power/soft-off behaviors.
I also recall AT to ATX and later uATX. Earlier motherboards were massive with socketed DRAM and SRAM chips and lots of simpler logic chips all over. They just kept shrinking as everything got more highly integrated. If you ever got a surplus Dell you might have encountered BTX too, which was like the left-handed universe.
I also had a phase with two uATX cases and almost had a "two space garbage collection" upgrade cycle, shifting parts in, between them, and out. One was my desktop PC and the other a "media PC" attached to TV and home stereo.
Some folks like me had a phase of trying to accelerate the down-sizing, abandoning our ATX/uATX for things like the Shuttle XPC mini/bookshelf computer formats. This meant more incompatible chassis, motherboard, and PSU formats. For me, a computer after 2000 was case/PSU + mobo/CPU/RAM + disk. The disk was either a single HDD/SSD or small software RAID array. At one time, we needed multiple disks for capacity, but now it can just be one or two M.2 drives on the motherboard and no disk bays at all.
This also leads to periodically thinking just a laptop will suffice, and then that becomes another thing that sees little upgrade and carry forward over longer time periods...
Usually for aesthetics though. Better airflow was secondary until more recently.
Look at how much you can fit onto a 1920x1080 display running Windows 2000 compared with a recent release of GNOME.
Bring back skeuomorphic design. Make buttons look like buttons again.
I get to spend less and still play any game at max, and I can actually run 2 instances of some heavy games for local coop using Nucleus (Nightreign specifically).
I use Niri as my desktop environment on linux, zero need for 4k. My screen is 27'' since 8 years ago when i bought it
https://www.jonpeddie.com/news/jon-peddie-research-multiple-...
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The first time I used a PC was an Amiga in 1989. As my username implies, I was only 7 years old at the time.
My first IBM-compatible PC was a 486, I think in 1993. My dad got a used one and bought some multimedia kit that included a CD-ROM drive and audio card (Likely Sound Blaster, or at the very least, Sound Blaster compatible). Played a bunch of Stellar 7 and King's Quest, but also got into DOOM and Master of Orion.
That 486 was the start of the Ship of Theseus PC, though I didn't play a part in replacing parts until 1999 when I was 17 and bought a new hard drive with the money from my first job. Until then, my dad did the upgrades, but I always watched with great interest.
> Some folks like me had a phase of trying to accelerate the down-sizing, abandoning our ATX/uATX for things like the Shuttle XPC mini/bookshelf computer formats.
The tiny form factors like uATX and ITX never really interested me. Even when I started going to LAN events, I preferred a normal sized PC, even though my current rig probably weighs like 30-35 lbs. My GPU alone is like 3 lbs, and the Hyte Y60 case is 21 lbs empty.
> This also leads to periodically thinking just a laptop will suffice
I could never. My demands for being able to upgrade, not to mention to have something aesthetically pleasing, are too much for a laptop. I don't even have a laptop for casual use.
I was running Linux on my 386 in college in '93. And within a year or so I had upgraded it to 486DX3 and had a DEC Alpha alongside it also running Linux, with the two connected by ethernet.
I haven't bought a discrete graphics card since those days and it was an XGA compatible 2D accelerator. Every 3D card I've used has been in a work machine. At home, I've always used iGPU solutions with my AMD Ryzen laptop being my most powerful. And I had more than one phase where a Thinkpad was all I had as we moved around.
Instead of graphcics, I went crazy with HDD arrays at times. Software RAID with 3-5 disks was the most cost effective and reliable way to do bulk storage for a time period before huge HDDs and SSDs were affordable. I even built a 10 disk mini tower PC for a family member who was obsessed with recording broadcast TV via MythTV.
I've never had a PC that didn't have a discrete graphics card.
But I'm a gamer, so a discrete graphics card is basically a necessity unless I stick with 10+ year old games and 2D games.
I struggle with the gaming hardware ROI, when I see how things become obsolete. E.g. my work bought me a Titan-X in 2015 for numerical/image processing work. Ten years later my Ryzen 7840u had nearly the same GFLOPs, though of course with less memory bandwidth. It also does it with vastly less heat/noise.
I know I would enjoy immersive VR. But I don't hink I would use it often enough to justify all that dedicated gear and the computer strong enough to drive it.
10 years is an eternity in computer hardware. The idea that you should be able to get 7+ years from your hardware is a more recent thing. Imagine comparing the 2.8 Ghz Pentium 4 you could get in 2002 with the 66 Mhz 486 that was state-of-the-art in 1993.
It used to be that processor speeds were literally doubling every ~18 months. The computer you bought to run Windows 95 would have choked on Windows XP 6 years later.
Hardware ROI has gotten better in terms of how long you can use a system. Just look at how many people on HN talk about using 10 year old hardware for both productivity and gaming. I've got a 5090, sure, but that's mainly because of wanting to play MS Flight Simulator 2024 and Cyberpunk 2077 with all the details cranked in 4K at 240 fps, and wanting enough VRAM to do local models. If I was okay with lower detail settings in 1080p at 60 fps, I could get by with even a 9 year old 1080 Ti.
Meanwhile, imagine trying to use a computer from 1992 in 2001 as Windows XP is dropping.
EDIT:
> I know I would enjoy immersive VR. But I don't hink I would use it often enough to justify all that dedicated gear and the computer strong enough to drive it.
It takes surprisingly little to enjoy VR. I think most games are written for the Quest 3 which isn't all that powerful, and then ported to PC with the same graphical fidelity. When I first got a VR headset, I was on a GTX 1070 and it played Beat Saber at the 90 fps that my headset did just fine.
I encountered subsequent Windows and Mac versions in work environments, but mostly kept them at arms length. I didn't embed myself the different Windows or Mac eras. Instead, I always had the same baseline, internet-connected machine experience with a similar environment of CLI, Emacs, X Windows, C programming, shell, Python, and other scripting languages like Scheme and Common LISP. The web arrived with Mosaic and evolved long with the content. Things like FTP sites, gopher, and USENET fell by the wayside.
But, the entire hardware history with Linux was a lot more incremental, overlapping, or blurry as far as different capabilities or needs. E.g. SMP, multi-core, large files, 3D acceleration, 64 bit, high speed networks, LCD monitors and associated video output formats. You could chase these different bits to your heart's content, but could also run for a long time with the same basic kit.
Due to CS in college and my career, I always had exposure to a range of IP networking technologies. My work computers were connected to the internet via ethernet and quite high speed WAN uplinks, while home went through the sequence of POTS, ISDN, ADSL, and cable modem. I was using Linux on Laptops, and we had WiFi at work since its very early days around 1997. We were also early adopters of 1000-BaseT in the LAN, so I remember the days when our data transfers were often limited by computer speed rather than trivially saturating the link.
To me, the increases in RAM and disk space over those decades were the most notable. I could do the same kinds of algorithmic work, but data sizes could be bigger. You can often let a program run longer, but a limited working-set size is a fundamental issue.
Of course, there were commensurate speed increases to make practical use of that extra space. I.e. how long does it take to transmit, store, and process these larger data that would exploit it? The realtime threshold brings associated eras. When was it practical to record/store/playback WAV audio, MP3, MPEG video, etc.