what if we cannibalize our long-term viability for a short-term gain says every dipshit in charge of tech hardware manufacturing.

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.

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.

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.

Somebody pop the zit that is AI.

It's such a shame to see high-performance computing and gaming more broadly become largely unaffordable. Hell, prior to the DRAM shortage, the current-generation game consoles were already MORE EXPENSIVE than they were at launch. And it's just going to get worse.

At least people aren't buying at these high prices, wouldn't want them to stay there after all.

I went from thinking about a full rig upgrade, to just buying the best used processor and GPU my am4 board could handle with my current PSU and ddr4 ram.

Went from a ryzen 1600x and a Nvidia 1060 to a ryzen 5 5600x and a Radeon rx 6600 xt. I'll be able to ride that out for a few years no problem.

Burst the fucking bubble already. I'm edging so hard right now.

Next up: MSI, ASUS, ... are pulling out of the consumer market due to falling revenue causing major price hikes.

This is hilarious. Intel after many years finally fixed their manufacturing process, but won't be able to sell chips because of memory crunch

Or gpu prices or hdd/ssd prices that never recovered from the tsunami. Consumers just keep getting fucked.

I fear they will pull a GPU and the storage prices will be permanently 50% higher after.

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'm on ryzen 9 5900x, rtx 3080, 32 GB DDR4, with mobo and psu that's ~€850 today and it will play most modern games on high settings 1080p at +100 fps. Computer hardware these days is a lot more like car hardware than it used to be. Generational improvements aren't as big and the price for a used 5 year old unit is a ⅓ of a new one. Unless you absolutely need the latest and greatest go with a used last gen.

I haven't made any purchases since tariffs drove up prices.

I was prepping to build a new NAS in 2026.

Not anymore sellouts.

Time to buy an AM5 MOBO to upgrade in 2028 then.

I'm sure it doesn't help that motherboard manufacturers have increasingly been targeting "whale" consumers over the last 10-15 years. I remember when a top of the line motherboard would cost you $300; and an average board was around $100-150.