Technology

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

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..

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...

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.

My 1080ti's retirement has been indefinitely postponed.

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.

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!

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

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

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.

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.

How often does gamers normally build new pc’s? I usually run my builds for 4-6 years, I don’t play a lot of AAA games, but I would not think that I’m in that small a minority. If gamers normally make new builds every 5 year, that fits the finding of 40% considering making a new build in the next 2 years.

Indie game devs looking around thinking, this is my chance for my potato graphics game to take over.

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

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

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

I bought a rog ally x and it plays all the games I need.

I only play sh**ty games that don't need much CPU anyway

And steam frame I'll buy too

I buy used.

An GMKtec EVO-X2 with 128GB was in my radar earlier last year, but at $3200 this is not something that I can justify buying.

Okay surely there is survivor bias for who ever the fuck is answering these polls but doesn't that number mean jackshit? Who spends thousands of dollars with plans to upgrade within 2-3 years? fucking less than 40% of pc gamers that is for fucking sure.

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.

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

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

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.