And after 26+ years of friendship, my buddy chose this month to be the month where he finally hunkered down and built his first PC. Of all the times to build a budget parts list for a friend…
We need global laws against gouging
This isn’t typical price gouging. It’s an industry moving away from consumers because our buying power is nothing compared to large corporations running on AI circlejerk VCs.
It’s also desirable for them because it decreases people building their own computers and pushing more people to buying premade ones they sell.
I mean, it is also that OpenAI cornered the RAM market, which is a typical price gouging scenario; it’s just weird that OpenAI wasn’t trying to make money directly through the maneuver. It does seem like they wanted prices to rise, though, to increase the barrier to competition.
It’s almost like unregulated capitalism is a certain highway to oligarchy and authoritarianism.
Yeah, they can be enforced by the power rangers across borders.
It’s a pipe dream, sadly.
i really wish I could have eeked out one more GPU upgrade before the shit hit the fan…but GPUs are at the point now where you gotta upgrade the PSU to upgrade the GPU since power draw demands are getting absolutely donk.
Weird aside, but I have a 14900k which just eats power. About 400ish watts draw during CPU benchmarks for total ststem draw. I had a 1000w psu and finally got a 5090. Now a 400w cpu + 600w gpu should not work- but it did. I did stress test both at the same time and hit 1100w, but it lived. Thing is, most games do not stress borh CPU and GPU at max at the same time, so real world usage I was always under.
Still, I want headroom, so I got a deal on a 1500w psu. New PSU is more efficient, and running the same simultaneous cpu/gpu benchmark I hit about 960w, so the efficiency bump kept me under my old psu limit. It did lead me to get a new PSU, but technically it would have been mostly okay.
GPUs at least are actually not that expensive right now. Aside from the 5090, they’re mostly close to MSRP, which is a pretty novel situation. I was waiting to upgrade my whole system for that, though, because my CPU would be a bottleneck at this point, and that’s not really an option now because of the crazy RAM prices. The past few years have been super frustrating for PC builders.
for now
by the time i can afford it, and a new PSU, the ram issue will probably see GPUs skyrocket as well. Especially with companies cutting consumer production for AI production.
Our economy increasingly is consumed to serve the rich. They are eating the world. Grocery stores increasingly cater to the wealthy. So do the automakers. Billionaires are buying up whole city blocks for themselves. And now we won’t be able to buy electronics because they’ve taken the resources for their speculative investments, and if they crash the economy our tax dollars will be appropriated to bail them out. It’s almost like we’re barreling towards a violent confrontation between the classes…
I for one am in favor of throwing the rich into wood chippers.
The rich and their bought and paid for politicians.
Feet first.
On the plus side, indie games that don’t require a rocket ship for a PC have never been better. So, can still play some good stuff on my old clunker. Thanks to Steam/Proton, they run even better on my old computer.
Would be nice to see the gaming industry pivot back to making innovative games within the constraints of hardware, instead of just expecting customers to throw ever more powerful (and power consuming) hardware at it.
As much (well deserved) hate that Nintendo gets, they are fantastic at this. They seem to be able to make games look good on low powered systems with stylistic decisions and smart optimization/coding. They learned some pretty important things in the NES/SNES era about using tricks to squeeze performance out of the few KB/MB they had to work with.
Yeah that crossed my mind, but if I’m not mistaken Pokemon was developed by Game Freak, only licensed by Nintendo.
DLSS has made devs lazy. Why bother optimizing when you can have some whiz bang AI algorithm turn a low res input into a greasy looking high res output.
Some Indy games using unreal engine can still bog down a fast PC…
Or gpu prices or hdd/ssd prices that never recovered from the tsunami. Consumers just keep getting fucked.
A rising tide drowns those who can’t swim.
It’s just nonsense. Absolutely nonsense.
Nothing lasts forever. Even this.
Yep. Being able to own a PC was nice while it lasted.
I mean… We will learn to make our rigs last, do more with less, and carry on optimizing Linux builds. Anything you can run today, you’ll be able to run tomorrow. And there is enough backlog to keep us all busy until at least 2028… Be honest with yourself lol
ELKS linux runs on 128 Kb RAM on ROM-based systems.
Or the PC market existing.
what if we cannibalize our long-term viability for a short-term gain says every dipshit in charge of tech hardware manufacturing.
you know when the bubble pops and they no longer have AI companies buying RAM they will switch back to consumers and keep the high prices.
if they’re still around when the financial shell game they’re playing finally comes to a stop. who am i kidding the government will bail them out.
Using your money.
if the US government were actually funded by taxes, then everything the government does would be with “my money”
Well, if you’re a citizen, the country is yours, and the government is there to manage it, but some assholes in power managed to convince people that it’s the other way around
Profits for me, losses for thee
That only works if we (the collective we) have more money. If a rich person has more $$ than a small country that means the effect we have is equivalent.
That’s why micron is doing what its doing. We are no longer the customer. They voted for us.
ha. they are renting the datacenters back to us.
its gonna be forced cloud computing for us and total control for them.
Of course, not all the companies survive and now there’s decreased competition, so we can shove prices up a little bit further
Absolutely
That’s every company, most upper management don’t stay in one position for more than 2 years. So the system is setup for short term gains because investors aren’t interested in long term investments and the blowback is the next guys problem. Who then is looking for the next big win to cover up the last guy issues without fixing anything. Then they bring in someone to clean up the mess and the cycle starts again.
Plus most consumers have short memories or don’t have an alternative so their stuck. There are small groups holding on but for 75% of the world’s population right now it’s Android or iOS, AMD or Intel, AMD or NVIDIA, Samsung or WD or Seagate or SanDisk, Att or Verizon, Apple or Microsoft, and so on.
That’s every company
Not every company, just most. Privately owned corporations aren’t legally obligated to kill long-term viability for short-term gaing like publicly traded companies are.
Many owners of privately owned corps are that dumb, but not all of them
Also your reputation. I had a Crucial SSD and was days from getting an identical one as a backup but then they said they were stopping consumer RAM sales so they’re now on my blacklist.
Question is, though, who now isn’t on your blacklist?
Samsung and SK Hynix never sold to consumers directly, yet seem to be avoiding flak. Micron is now joining them in that.
Who do you get that isn’t that three? Almost all RAM on the market is Samsung, SK Hynix, or Micron.
On top of that, Samsung and SK Hynix were the ones that signed the OpenAI deal (OpenAI bought 40% of the world’s DRAM supply and kicked off panic buying), so tbh Micron is the least responsible for the current DRAM market issues.
how are they in control? market demand is an outside force
Wow, I can’t believe my plan for a cheap motherboard worked.
If sales are going down, prices of the motherboards are going up.
Going to gouge all the midstream businesses in the long run. Hardware retailers, PC assemblers, all those little companies selling custom cases and overclock kits and fancy cooling appliances.
The lack of cheap but crucial components will have some ugly coat tails for the rest of the industry.
Burst the fucking bubble already. I’m edging so hard right now.
It’s a play to make at home compute unachievable, forcing people to pay for subscription cloud services and cloud compute in walled gardens.
I don’t agree. The prices will rise across the board no matter where you site the memory or if it’s in a gaming computer or otherwise. Renting will always be more expensive than owning because competitors must recoup the capital cost of buying and make margin at the same time.
At least people aren’t buying at these high prices, wouldn’t want them to stay there after all.
This is a good point, we don’t need PCs to be this expensive.
I just hope we don’t fuck up the whole thing and end up with cloud computers or end up not making new PCs…
5 years ago I would’ve called you insane, but with everything happening right now… it’s a distinct possibility.
RAM’s unaffordable, GPU’s will likely be harder to come by and more expensive. Microsoft is actively driving people away from Windows, Steam is launching their Steam Machine…
Here’s hoping many gamers will jump to Linux and grow that platform instead. But even then, too expensive hardware will be an issue.
We’re living in interesting times.
I would have called myself insane five years ago too!
Yeah, jumping to Linux could help a bit. I did that a couple of years ago, but that was more because I couldn’t upgrade to Win 11 on my almost a decade old PC. Now I’m glad I couldn’t upgrade to Win 11 haha.
I had a laptop with Win 11 tho but I never got used to it and don’t want AI and shit in any of my computers so I jumped over to Linux on that to.
Maybe Steam will save the day with the Steam Cube? Isn’t that pretty much a normal gaming PC?
You’ll be happy with the government supplied computers whether you like it or not.
I don’t understand what their long-term plan is here. Even if AI isn’t a bubble eventually all of the AI companies are going to get to a point where they don’t need more compute because they’re working on algorithmic optimisations because they decide that that’s cheaper.
Then they’re going to have to pivot back to the consumer market. Except by that point it won’t even be a consumer market because China will have eaten their lunch.
Speculative
I don’t understand what their long-term plan is here.
They most likely don’t have one. Keep in mind that tech bros and C-suite execs are sociopathic dumbasses. We saw this with AAA gaming studios and private equity where they just assume line will continually go up
The plan is to continue making bank until the companies are done with them, then sell to consumers again without missing a beat.
Source: the GPU shortage we just went through.
Future source: the CPU shortage scheduled for 2026.
That’s my point though they can’t do that.
The market isn’t just going to wait around for them to get around to selling to consumers again. China is going to see an opening and they’re going to manufacture their own chips and make bank. Then when the traditional manufacturer is getting their head out of their arses then realise there market share has vanished. All 100% their fault.
They have decided to shoot themselves in the foot because someone’s convinced them they won’t ever need legs ever again.
Eh, Chinese manufacturers are also desperately trying to catch up with AI hype. In any case, we’ll see some new brands on the market, and it’s not a bad thing, and I would not spend my time worrying about giant rich corporations.
My actual worry is that once RAM prices go up, they won’t go down for quite some time. If we get another bubble after AI bubble pops, the prices may not decrease at all.I hope China moves to Linux once they get around to pushing their own consumer PC parts and move on from Windows. It’s just madness to me that countries will use OS of countries they aren’t on good terms with and use it to do important work on it and store important data on it.
I read a great article recently that tries to analyze what exactly went down and for what reasons. And most importantly, the effects it’s going to have on different hardware prices: https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram-deal
Yeah that’s widely considered to be the article about it tbh
Yeah people will probably turn to China when it comes to consumer pc hardware in the future like how when it comes to drones its been primarily just China actually interested in selling to regular people.
Cloud computing. Stallman was right.
We would need a better general network for that. Remember stadia? Nothing has changed since then, hell some areas have even lost some capacity.
I’d you’re talking about cloud computing for gaming specifically (as you can of course use cloud computing for, well, everything), then maybe it’s not good enough in the US, I don’t know enough about that area to say, but networking is definitively more than sufficient in Europe.
Not american, But most of the world does not have the network. And Europe might have a good enough network, but not everywhere, and who knows if the current network will handle the sort of extra load that moving everything off local hardware would create.
Noooooo don’t say that ;a;
The companies making the ram chips are not the ones making motherboards. They just want to sell their product for as much as they can.
Shutting down your entire consumer business does seem a bit short sighted though - keep the doors open for the future.
Makes sense. CPU/Mobo/RAM typically go together in a rebuild. Storage, case, PSU, perepherals, GPU can often carry over between builds as they’re all pretty backwards compatible.
Yeah. This makes pretty good sense. Make some ram and SSDs - lowee the price - and I’m sure Motherboard sales will go up.
It’s funny how people don’t want to buy motherboards without anything else
I only change motherboards when moving up to the next RAM format or CPU chipset. I stick with AMD due to cost and low thermals, and while their CPU generations shared the same interface I had one mobo for DDR3, one for DDR4, etc.
Can’t wrap my head around constantly upgrading the mobo to be honest. Sure, they have lots of features but I haven’t seen a situation where a mobo would be an upgrade worth doing without also upgrading everything else.
How often do you upgrade your computer? I do the same but without really trying, it’s literally the case that by the time I start to feel I need a new pc there is already a new CPU socket, often several, and new ram format. I’ve almost never been able to actually reuse stuff. I imagine the only scenario where I could do that would be if some component straight up broke
Maybe every 5 or so years, and generally there has been something worth upgrading the mobo for like new connections for storage. So far it has been when it struggled with 75+ FPS in games that I care about at the settings I want.
Since it is so spread out I can’t say it is a solid pattern, but so far each CPU and mobo upgrade have been together with a new set of RAM and occasionally I get extra RAM in between. Hard drives/SSDs and GPUs are whenever but generally they are years apart too.
The only time I’ve ever done that is during an upgrade chain that results in a motherboard not fitting into the case I need it to. Even then, the last one I bought was from a local used parts shop since I had an Intel 4670k I wanted to slap into a server.
Yeah but it’s like the gearbox. While everything’s pulled apart, you may as well swap out the clutch, bearing, and flywheel too because they’ll need replacing again first. Especially if better versions of them are now supported.
