Technology

One of the commenters said:

"avoid building a PC right now" is advice I've been following since 2017

And honestly yeah. I guess at this point if you can afford it, just pull the plug whenever, it's always some bullshit going on the PC Market anyway.

Don't consume any AI products. Don't consume any products made or marketed with AI products. Don't support any companies than invest in AI or are invested in because of AI. Lets kill this nonsense in 2026 and bring computing, jobs and wealth back into the hands of ordinary people. And a prememptive - NO BAILOUT for the tech bros when this shit crashes.

As (relatively) old as they are, midrange Core i5 chips from Intel’s 12th-, 13th-, and 14th-generation Core CPU lineups are still solid choices for budget-to-midrange PC builds.

I would be hesitant about obtaining secondhand 13th or 14th gen desktop Intel CPUs, since those are the ones that destroy themselves over time. There is no way to know whether they've been run on non-updated BIOSes and damaged themselves. I burned through an i9-13900 and an i9-14900 myself. Started with occasional errors and gradually got worse until they couldn't even get through boot. I am sure that there are lots of people trying to unload damaged processors (knowingly or unknowingly) that have only seen the early stages of damage.

12th-gen CPUs are safe.

Consider pre-built systems. A quick glance at Dell’s Alienware lineup and Lenovo’s Legion lineup makes it clear that these towers still aren’t particularly price-competitive with similarly specced self-built PCs. This was true before there was a RAM shortage, and it’s true now. But for certain kinds of PCs, particularly budget PCs, it can still make more sense to buy than to build.

I just picked up two Alienware PCs for relatives to take advantage of this window, but it was only something like a two-week window, where Dell announced at the beginning of December that they were doing price increases to reflect the RAM shortage mid-December. I believe that that window is closed now (or, well, it might still be cheaper to get DIMMs with a PC than separate, but not to get memory that way at pre-memory-shortage prices any more).

EDIT: From memory, Lenovo announced that they were doing their RAM-induced price increases at the beginning of January, so for Lenovo, it might still work for another week-and-a-half or so.

EDIT2: 15th gen Intel CPUs are also safe WRT damage, but like AMD's AM5-socket processors, they can't use DDR4 memory, which is what the author is trying to find a route to do.

Get Into books.

IMO, the pricing is an extortion scam rather than a real shortage. People are falling for it because of AI hype narrative. Best to wait it out.

How about just don't buy a PC for now? I'm sure the machine you've got in good enough. Just hang on to it until the prices come back down

I guess my ageing i5-8400, 16GB, GTX 1060 rig can keep hobbling along a while yet.

Although I was amused to see my Legion Go S actually has a more powerful CPU now.

Best advice is grab an AM4 motherboard and go for DD4 ram. You wont notice a difference in performance for majority of games. DDR4 ram and AM4 cpu's are cheap.

How much RAM does a time machine require because that seems to be the basic advice here.

Not a hardware fix, but there's memory compression. It sounds like Windows 11 defaults to having memory compression on:

https://www.xda-developers.com/little-known-windows-feature-hurting-your-pcs-performance-heres-how-can-disable-it/

Linux has zswap and zram to do memory compression, which I've mentioned here recently. I don't know of any distros that turn it on by default. It sounds from recent reading like for modern systems with SSD swap, zswap is probably preferable to zram.

Looks like I'm going to be stuck in 2023 for a long long time...

So do we expect the cost of gpu's to also rise due to this? Some money is opening up and next year I wanted to upgrade anyway. Might just need to buy it earlier

Is it time to start shucking mini pcs and game consoles?

As a silver lining, you think this could stabilize GPU prices? Or at least CPU prices?

If there's less RAM/SSDs to build PCs with, then people will buy fewer GPUs/CPUs for them.

DDR6 will be about to release by the time RAM prices return to normal..