You must log in or # to comment.
I haven’t really felt the need to upgrade since I first got a gaming PC. I’ve only ever replaced it when the last one was broken enough to not be worth trying to repair.
The funny thing is, these days maybe 85% of my time gaming is spent playing games that absolutely don’t need all the processing power I have. It is nice to be able to play the occasional AAA game, but all of them have looked fine to me. I haven’t really thought “damn this could look/run so much better if I spent another thousand dollars or so.”
I’ve actually been joking with friends about the unnecessary level of detail in some of these games. I was streaming God of War Ragnarok for them and we zoomed in on Kratos’ head and we joked about how some guy had to model the wrinkles on the back of his head/neck when it never matters and you only notice it when you’re going out of your way to zoom in on the details.
Games have reached a level of detail that is more than enough to convey any gameplay or narrative sufficiently. There’s nothing to keep pace with and I’m just hoping this one lasts long enough to avoid the price spike.
I started putting together a RAID, got the housing and the first drive, the plan was to buy a drive with each paycheck until I had the 4 drives I need. The first drive was like $250, arrived last week. Then I checked the price this week and the same drive is now $650.
I feel like that’d be the stats even if we didn’t have a component disruption. Do all gamers build a new machine every year? They’d be broke (said the guy who buys / builds a lot of toys).
It’s cool to phrase non-news as clickbait. 50% people think $MYTEAM will win the big game. Holy crap, that’s news!
A hobby where 40% of people need a new fancy computer every 2 years is bad for the planet.
I honestly can’t remember the last time I played a game that couldn’t be played on a potato. No AAA games have interested me in years
For those people consumerism is the hobby. They don’t get anything by buying new computer every 2 years, other than the act of buying itself. For wast majority of gamers the cycle is closer to 8-10 years. Personally, I’m playing on a laptop that I bought in 2020 and it runs everything I want it to run no problem, and I’m planning to change it only when it breaks irreparably.
If there are economic bubbles, I am figuring on picking up some gear on the cheap after the big companies start falling apart. For now, I am just buying stuff that aren’t fairly generic and not prone to aging. In this case, a THOR NAS desktop tower. My older THOR V2 chassis isn’t quite right for modern GPU lengths, so hopefully the THOR NAS would be able to accommodate my older hardware while permitting the new stuff.
I got about 20tb of SATA SSD and a optical drive, so I needed a tower with front bays to accommodate those. Plus, I will be trying out this newfangled “M.2” stuff with my next build for the OS & Gaming drives, which takes up further case space.
“60% of gamers have no plans to build a computer for the foreseeable future.” The unspoken part is, “and the hardware manufacturers don’t care”. Maybe they will after the bubble pops, or maybe not.
I just bought a mini desktop-- Ryzen 5 with 16Gb memory and 1Tb SSD. It cost me almost $500US. It probably was $100 less last year. I’m not a gamer, but I do make heavy use of 3D CAD and sometimes with large assemblies. And my old Nitro 5 and 1650 nVidia had been starting to struggle.
I do like my new little computer, with Aurora 44 installed, win11 was aborted on first boot, it’s a snappy little box despite the modest specs. The downside is, there isn’t enough time to make a cuppa tea while waiting on a model regen.
And who knows, I may live long enough to afford another stick of ram, or I may win the lottery someday-- assuming I buy a lottery ticket first.
I upgraded my 8 year rig right when Trump was elected thinking tariffs would screw me. Did not forsee AI being the bigger factor
I run my boxes for so long I end up having to basically build a whole new rig by the time it is obsolete thanks to socket, RAM and GPU changes. Feels like it almost defeats the purpose of rolling your own. I mostly just use my Steam Deck at this point. Tired of keeping up with all that combined with shortages.
This is what I’ve done for 35 years. My current build is almost seven years old. My previous build, now 12 years old, is my current media server, the ones before that are recycled.
Also, by the time I build a new one, I need to research everything all over again, because it’s all changed so much. I don’t keep up with the hardware very well between builds.
I don’t think this defeats the purpose, as I don’t expect a computer to last forever. I do reuse what few parts I can, such as power supplies, cases, fans, and hard drives.
I think it’s always been like that, unless you upgrade a CPU for a 10% improvement.
I tended to do GPU as one upgrade, then the rest a few years later, treating the RAM, CPU and mobo as one unit.
But since prices of everything have been out of whack for ages now, I’m sticking with this 1060/i5-8400 box until something gives. If I want the latest whizzo graphics, I’ll play my PS5.
There used to be a sweet spot of early adopter where you could resell early enough and still make back 75% or more of the price. It’s just so prohibitive and unnecessary now to upgrade like that
From my own experience I would say that you’re probably not finding a chance to do intermediary upgrades because upfront you bought the top-range everything and maxed out things like memory and storage, and/or did not get a really good hobbyist motherboard (which is the part where you should really splurge).
I don’t get into the muggers’ game of top-range were you pay 2x-3x for just an extra 10% performance but instead get the stuff at the sweet-spot of price-performance, and then some years latter I can get stuff with what was before top-range performance at normal prices without a premium.
Similarly I don’t max out on things like memory and storage from the very start - I get what I need then and when I see that I need more I get more, by which point normally (not this shit going on right now) Moore’s Law means it’s way cheaper.
For example, the PC I’m using now for gaming recently got an improved CPU which wasn’t even out when I first bought this PC and which was near top range back then (as server CPU, even), which would’ve been $200 back then but was only $17 second hand some years later.
Of course, this way of doing things got totally fucked up with this PC parts bubble. Frankly the last PC upgrade I did was replacing Windows with Linux which in terms of how it feels was equivalent to a CPU and memory upgrade.
In the other 40% there’s the people that, like me, built a good future proof pc several years ago (mine is 10 years old) and it still plays what I like but it’s showing signs of aging. One day, it will stop working.
I’m just praying it holds up for a couple more years because otherwise I’m screwed.
I try to make it a habit to build a whole new machine when a new AMD socket to accommodate a major memory standard comes out. Way I figure, many people will dump their older hardware, so I can get a bargain on top-shelf stuff of the older standard. So when DDR6 is out, I pick up a 1024gb of DDR5 and a Threadripper of the generation.
While I don’t like the FOMO from not adopting the latest platform, my wallet much appreciates the mercy.
I’m at 14 years, with one gpu upgrade to a 970, and I’m just here sacrificing to any god out there at this point. I’ve become pretty comfortable with indie games, and even a few well optimized games (elden ring, for example, runs pretty well), but when my friends just jumped into subnautica 2, that was a big :(
We sold our last desktop before doing a huge move and bought a temp laptop. Now we’re unable to get a desktop because of pricing. Our last desktop cost about 750usd to build and it was pretty good specs for the time. Now the same parts would be 1500… bruh and we wanted to upgrade the whole system… seems like we’ll have to make our temporary laptop semi permanent
My big computer is knackered. It’s about 10 years old now and properly starting to chug on even the newer indy games I like. But with a 16 month old toddler in the house and a crunch on cost of living upgrading I have nothing to spare on a new computer especially how much components are costing these days.
My rig is 10y old but it doesn’t actually feel all that old thanks to Linux; I also play mostly 2d games so that probably helps. Needless to say I’m overdue for an upgrade but that prob won’t happen anytime soon now :(
Mine is about 7 and I keep forgetting it’s not “current gen” because it still runs new games at mid-high settings at the framerate and resolutions I care about.
my 1st gen is still going. it’s i7 and 32gb ram so still plenty good for what i need it to do (hell, so is the older athlon next to it, ftm), even with the unsupported ‘upgrade’ and ancient hdd for boot and storage. i have a spare identical mb and cpu, just in case. i have better systems, i just like that one. we have a long history together and everything is right where i want, and expect, it to be.
That i7 sounds like my system. Fyi if you get tired of the hdd boot they make an m2 pcie card that works pretty good
My 6700xt will be getting new wind next year with fsr 4.1. Why would I through my money away on overpriced hardware?
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.
Join an improv group, take dance classes or join a theatre club. If that’s not your vibe then join a board game club or learn to play an instrument. I’ve seen lots of people take up new hobbies since this nonsense started. At first this whole AI thing really bummed me out but it’s made me get in touch with the things I really care about. I think we’re headed for interesting times
Lol, I love my instrument, but it was about 4x the cost of my computer. Right now prices, with the same rough performance of a computer, it would still be about 2-3x.
For a kid, a cheap instrument isn’t going to be a big deal as you learn, but if you really want a decent sound from one as an adult that cares about it (because you actually know you’ll want to stick with it), you’re going to be spending a decent bit of money.
If you live in a major city your public library might have musical instruments to loan.
