Technology

With an initial config on am4, I left it untouched (except from watercooling because the shit is fun) for 7 years, with a ryzen 7 5700x3d and doubling the RAM capacity (16Go to 32Go). The new ryzen died and I got a ryzen 9 5950x, I paired it with a rx 9070xt and a ventirad, and now I hope it can last for a decade. I don't even play modern demanding games (most recent on the list would be cyberpunk 2077)

I built my first PC last November and because RAM was about 2-3 times the price that it should have been I passed on it. Now it's like 5x the price and it's not even a choice anymore, but I think I still made the right decision by not financially supporting those prices. Got 16GB of second hand SODIMM and some Sodimm to Dimm adapters and honestly the PC is fine. In my original parts list I had planned to get 128GB just to max out the board and not think about it ever again (would have been a reasonable 550€ back in September) but now I think I'll actually coast a bit longer with my 16GB. It should be fine for the next few years at least, especially since there's no overhead from Windows BS on my machine.

To play all those games that aren't being made?

This whole post seems founded on the shaky assumption that all PC gamers would be on a roughly 3 year rebuild cycle anyway...

Not in my experience.

Even my most PC enthusiast friends would only ever have been upgrading every ~5 years anyway. That makes the '40% in 3 years' an unexpectedly high number of upgraders.

My main PC rig is closer to ten years now, and no upgrade in sight. Cost of living with kids has made expensive hobbies untenable.

On the bright side, now I can divert my small amount of extra money to more tattoos since my main expensive hobby is priced out by ai slopcenters

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...

My 1080ti's retirement has been indefinitely postponed.

When the AI shit flops and when it does bursts.. there will pc parts for everyone!! Can’t wait.

I mean why build a pc with specs that I could have had years ago for the same price.

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!

Just 60? Everyone I know has dropped all plans for the foreseeable future. Even those building their first PC.

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..

I have a 5 years old laptop and was planning on building a home pc but I can't afford this shit now. I'm still planning on it but now I have to wait till I save enough money to even be able to enter a store.

Microsoft and game devs facing the reality of having to do more with the same hardware rather than speed running hardware obsolescence.

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.

40% seem to have disposable income to be able to afford a decent build at today’s prices. I couldn’t.

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

As is by design.

Eventually you will fold and buy a tablet with cloud services because that’s it? That’s all that’s left. your pc eventually dies,but they made Linux illegal because it doesn’t do full rectal scans as federally mandated, the Google Probe uses USB-G which is a proprietary standard you can’t get without buying a new dumb terminal by the newly merged Micro-Google-Oracle-DOJ-Palantir-McDonalds, your ISP has finally banned your unauthorized device that doesn’t conform to IPv8, which is designed to make it easier to block domains at a much more fundamental address level.

Please subscribe to verification cans.

I got really lucky. I bought my PC between the crypto crash, right before the AI uprising.

Buying from Costco is still relatively decent.

So 40% do? I feel like 40% of a population building a new PC every 2 years is very significant

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.

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.

Just going to work on my game log as well to stay away from newer games and the temptation to upgrade.

I'm also waiting for a price drop. Since this is absurd