I fear they will pull a GPU and the storage prices will be permanently 50% higher after.
I mean, that’s capitalism, right? The manufacturers see that their product is still selling at a 300% markup, why would they bring the price back down when they can just make more profit if/when costs for them come back down? Sure they might drop it a little to make it “look” like a good deal. Just like GPUs. They went from being $600 for high end, to being $2000. Then when they announced that the next Gen was “only” going to be $1200 everybody was like “Wow! What a great deal!”
I hate this timeline. They just keep figuring out new ways to squeeze money out of me and ruining my hobbies.
But this only works long-term with collusion. Which i don’t see the current administration persecute much.
This does seem likely, especially if it’s as the article claims and this continues into 2028. After 2 and a 1/2 years of triple digit profits nobody is going to be satisfied with a measly 14% or whatever markup they were getting before.
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.
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.
Yeah. At least I managed to pick up a used 3070 a couple years ago. I’ll just jolly along my old i7-7700k system for a few more years…
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.
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.
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.
I still got a 4670k in my server. Thought of upgrading in Q1. I can forget all about that now… Unfortunately my mobo is slowly dying, so there’s a limit on how long I can push it.
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.
Just use Intel CPUs and you’ll understand, as they seem to invent a new incompatible socket every five minutes requiring a new mobo.
That is part of why I have avoided them, far easier to mix and match AMD stuff to meet my price points since their sockets stick around so long!
Each PC lasts me at least 5 years. I am three or so years on my 5800x3d with a 7090XT I picked up last year and the whole setup will probably still be rocking games past 2030.
Hah I just upgraded to that setup at the beginning of the year from a 2017 ryzen 1700 and GTX 1080 build.
It increased the longevity of this system by so much
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.
because youd only swap mobos for either aesthetics(expensive, not often done) at best because you choose to downsize, or because you need more pci-e I/O.
the average user doesn’t use all their pci-e i/o, and the ones that do, are looking towards workstation motherboards, which is almost a completely different market from the consumer level stuff. It’s a game of, you know when you need more i/o, and if you needed it, you probably would have never bought the consumer level board in the first place.
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.
Oh I didn’t even think of this. There are so many companies that could get into trouble because of this, and they will all get mad at the AI bullshitters.
Does China not have any companies that can make RAM? Seems like an opportunity to grab some market share. But maybe they don’t, or maybe they’d prefer to sell it to AI companies too.
CXMT has ddr5 manufacturing capabilities but it will be years before they scale it, and they’re embargoed by the US, so nobody on good terms with the US can get it.
And yes, they would also sell to the enterprise customers, but it would lower prices overall.
they’re embargoed by the US, so nobody on good terms with the US can get it.
So no one.
Why would a Chinese for-profit corporation differ from any other? Except for the Chinese ones having backing from a garbage authoritarian empire. Maybe they can get free slaves from the state?
Because the Chinese government controls Chinese companies whereas the American government just lets companies do whatever the hell they want.
Chinese government controls Chinese companies. American companies control American government.
The only rich country with actual legal slavery is the US.
They do, but perhaps they haven’t expanded yet into your market. I see some here sometimes.
Welp, sucks to be a motherboard manufacturer. Always getting dragged along by other component manufacturers.
They had a little bit of reprise with the surge of SFF PCs but not much.
What’s an SFF PCS?
Small form factor, or something like that . Little motherboard possibly fanless, space for one or maybe 2 2.5 hd. The little thing you can use for a nice video player at home or the cash register at work
Been thinking of getting an N150 mini PC sometime. Stick proxmox on it and pihole. Probably a web server and host media on it too.
Not sure how well it would run dwarf fortress in a VM, play over SSH. Otherwise there is still CDDA.
Small computers are more powerful than you think, if used properly. I stick with a bunch of containers instead of VMs and it all just hums along nicely on a Raspberry Pi 5.
Pi-Hole running all the time barely registers as a workload.
Yeah, I suspect I have a fair few games that could run in it but ARM doesn’t help for anything closed source stuff.
An N150 mini PC don’t cost that much more once you consider that it comes with storage as well, not looked since RAM went silly though.
I don’t think it would be much use other than emulated computers/consoles/arcades.
I heard about Fex for x86 emulation, but never tried it myself.
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.
If they lower their prices of MOBOs to try and generate more sales, that might actually be worth it long term. For RAM, I saw the other day a Laptop RAM conversion to desktop. Which apartment Laptop RAM is still lower priced. There might some interesting Frankenstein builds in the coming months
Oh, was this the Salem Techsperts video?
Perhaps, I don’t recall I didn’t pay enough attention.
Yeah but laptop ram hacks aren’t really a sustainable long term solution because we live in hell and scalpers will buy it all up if it becomes mainstream. And newly manufactured laptop ram will have all the same price issues because they need chips from the same fabs.
Laptop RAM is always going to be slower than it’s equivalent too. Hopefully that keeps the prices just lower if people want to go this route.
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.
It’s just nonsense. Absolutely nonsense.
memory is way up
GPU’s will need memory, production cuts
followed by production cuts for cpu’s monitors and powersupplies
welcome to the $10k mid range gaming PC in 2027
And all that just for some shitty AI that’s getting all its questions wrong
And my monthly power bill has tripled to subsidize them. I’m paying for several new PCs for someone whether I like it or not.
I wonder if developers will finally start taking middle end GPUs and the existing handhelds seriously.
There are “Deck optimized” games that run horrendously. But what if people can’t afford new hardware for the next four years? It’s either fix the performance or lose sales. The Switch 2 is likely going to become the most common performance target, and having only 12GBs of shared memory, it actually helps PCs in this situation.
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I wonder if developers will finally start taking middle end GPUs and the existing handhelds seriously
They’ll have to, soon enough, if they wanna continue selling games
run horrendously. But what if people can’t afford new hardware for the next four years? It’s either fix the performance or lose sales. The Switch 2 is likely going to become the most common performance target, and having only 12GBs of shared memory, it actually helps PCs in this situation.
One could hope, but the cost will carry through to consoles as well :(
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.
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.
How dare you suggest that there is a future beyond next quarter!
Speculative
These companies are controlled almost entirely by people who only really care about what the stock price will be sometime in the next few years or so.
*quarters, or even months
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 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.
Cloud computing. Stallman was right.
Noooooo don’t say that ;a;
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.
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.
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.
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.
Somebody pop the zit that is AI.
AI isnt a zit, its a giant infected boil and blister now.
A giant cyst that got infected and is now life threatening.
I don’t disagree lance that green puss filled cavity.
This is hilarious. Intel after many years finally fixed their manufacturing process, but won’t be able to sell chips because of memory crunch
If only they had a solid state technology that expanded system memory… Shutting down optane comes to bite them, again.
