It’s wild, like people get into things when there is novelty and affordability and then leave when one of those goes away.
My biggest question now is, what will supplant PC building/other super high end stuff? I grew up on Halo and early CoDs, but now that I’m old and suck at video games (particularly online multiplayer), and seeing a huge shift toward battle royale and dark souls style gameplay, I felt like I was long overdue to start reading more/working out more/hiking/etc.
Switching to Linux breathed new life into my current, newest machine, built in 2019. I lost track of time, and didn’t realize it had been that long, but it runs fine and does what I want it to do, so why blow money on a new machine?
This box better not break anytime soon lmaooo
One of my motherboard’s memory slots went bad, no idea why. Figuring out if it was RAM or, if the motherboard, exactly what was wrong, was a tense few hours because neither is getting replaced.
I game on emulators and old DOS games. The most hardware intensive game I play is Oblivion with mods and OpenMW with mods. Plays just fine on a T14 Gen 3.
At this rate I will end up downgrading when something breaks instead and just turn graphics down a bit.
I was thinking about an Intel ultra 9 series 3 mini pc for “good enough” steam play.
Ive been looking into this stuff. They all have weird names and benchmarks / gaming reviews take forever research
I got disenchanted with PC building after my first and last build. It had benefits, like being able to buy one component at a time instead of spending a bunch at once (except now it’s spending a bunch many times to build). Reparability is nice too.
But my issue is that despite getting what were some of the best components at the time, I’m at a place where virtually every part needs an upgrade, so I may as well build a whole new PC, and why bother if that’s the case?
If the upcoming Steam Machine is less than $1000, I am probably getting one.
why bother if that’s the case?
I always understood part of the appeal of building your own being that you could go PC of Theseus on it and upgrade parts gradually over time, rather than having to drop $1,500-$2,000 all in one go.
This is what I do. The only parts left from the original build are a pair of 2TB HDDs installed back when it was a Win7 system.
I’m ready to be on ye ole am4 for at least another decade… I see no reason to upgrade any time soon. If prices crash in 27 or 28 and upgrading to am5 became financially realistic id consider it but I realistically just don’t see that happening
Same boat brother! Honestly I haven’t found anything yet that my AM4 doesn’t crush. Sure someday I’ll replace it. Someday.
My pc was 8 years old and I had already planned on upgrading so when the prices started going up I got a microcenter CPU/mobo/ram bundle that was still reasonably priced. I paid extra for the video card though. I managed to keep it under 2k buying all new parts but the same build is almost 1k more expensive just two months later.
The other 39% are optimistically hoping the bubble will pop within that 2 years and there will still be a market to buy from.
I have no such illusions - but a bit of me wonders if, possibly, this may drive the pc market back in the direction of its origins:
Devs were incentivised to write more efficient, leaner code because resources were expensive.
PC users focused on squeezing every. goddamn. drop. of performance out of their existing gear. Overclocking wasnt about making your 200 fps into 300 - it was about making that aging beast play something it had no right to even run.
I dont look forward to the coming days with any optimism… but maybe this whole scene needed a purging fire to foster new growth and diversity.
Or maybe we’ll just purge the source of these issues. Or both. Both would be nice. I can dream.
Don’t worry they’ll turn their datacenters into virtual PC hosting so that people who can’t afford to upgrade will have to rent the hardware…
Thats ezactly what they want to do, bur when that happens we must resist it. Play old game. Use legacy hardware. Participation is tantamount to acceptance.
Middleman all the things. It pains me to say that, in all likelihood, this period of time will be known for nothing but reinventing something that already exists - making a worse version of it - then enshitify.
What blows me away is while most people read dystopian stories and view them as cautionary tales… these rejects are using it as a framework.
“We finally succeeded in building the ‘Torment Nexus’, inspired by the book ‘Don’t create the Torment Nexus’.”
Dont forget how many of these twats name their companies after shit that literally screams “we are the baddies.”
Goodness who ever would have thought that “child crushers inc :)” would be crushing children?
That plus the ever growing push for device linked personal ID on personally owned device feels like the real end goal. Governments can already snoop all web traffic. Now they want to close the gap on device level surveillance by pushing more and more people towards renting virtual devices with traceable payment methods. For people who don’t, device link to personal ID means they no longer have any of that mess of having to prove ownership or who took the action.
Removing the tinfoil hat though, I really hope this causes cloud resource cost to drop through the floor.
It was always about control. No tin foil. Just reality. When you get to these levels of disproportionate power, greed, and corruption… you need to be able to quickly “stamp out” anything that even vauguely looks like a threat.
They dont want us to communicate. Obviously. Communication leads to revolution. No secrets. No encryption. No rights. Be a good drone and keep your head down. Smile for the cameras.
I wanted to build a PC last year, but there were no sales. I considered delaying a year as RAM prices went up, but it’s looking like prices won’t even go down after 2 years. I might do it in 2027, but only if my finances are doing good.
It’d be more financially prudent to just upgrade my current (DDR4) machine.
First it was crypto, now it’s AI.
Two stupid fucking things we never wanted.
Fuck every crypto bro and every AI enthusiast.
Its the necessary pieces for the next steps. They need crypto for programmable money so they can turn you off, digital ID so they can track your every move in the modern world, AI combined with mass surveillance to enforce it all. Someone wants this world, thats for sure.
There’s a lot of overlap in those two groups
The Crypto bros needed something to offload all the gpus they bought and found a word salad maker that relies on them.
Right wing lunatics are big in both.
Crypto because the hurrdurr keep gubmint outta my lyfe shit (despite the fact that crypto is infinitely more easy to track than cash…), and AI because they hate liberal reality, so AI lets them generate all the videos they could hope to have to validate their fake victimhoods.
Imagine when the crypto train was full on, somebody said that something other will come along where the crypto train will be small joke in comparison.
It’s not like we didn’t have a near infinite amount of games available from retro 8bit games all the way to the latest and greatest. Honestly, there’s enough games or there that don’t require high end PCs to play.
Heck, I got a long ass list of games I bought nearly 10 years ago that I haven’t ended played yet because I bought so many. On PC and Switch!
I’m good.
that’s especially true since games just kinda stopped looking better imo. i think 2014-2019 was the peak of game graphics, i just can’t stand that smeary ai upscaled temporal anti-aliasing look, i prefer msaa or just plain ssaa, it looks so much crisper
For me that’s not true for VR games. There’s still a lot to do in terms of graphics and they are harder and harder to run with VR headsets that always need more resolutions to make the games look how they should look without so many visible pixels. The new 4K per eye panels are pretty much perfect but that’s really hard to run.
I regret not buying a new CPU+MB+RAM half a year ago. I told myself that what I have is good enough for another year or two. I wanted to sell just so that it doesn’t become so devalued that it’s not worth it to sell, or so that it doesn’t just fail on me like 3-4 year old hardware sometimes does.
I can afford new things, but I don’t want to support the market in its current state. Just some months ago a 64 gig DDR5 kit used to cost maybe 200 EUR, and for less than 500 I could even get 96; now both are about triple these numbers respectively, so hard pass on this for now. I’m going to spend on things that are still reasonably priced (e.g. I’m in for a new PSU and case).
hopefully this wont end with pc component market drying completely so companies can force us to use their stupid remote pc crap.
