And after 26+ years of friendship, my buddy chose this month to be the month where he finally hunkered down and built his first PC. Of all the times to build a budget parts list for a friend...
this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2025
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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.
We need global laws against gouging
This isn't typical price gouging. It's an industry moving away from consumers because our buying power is nothing compared to large corporations running on AI circlejerk VCs.
I mean, it is also that OpenAI cornered the RAM market, which is a typical price gouging scenario; it's just weird that OpenAI wasn't trying to make money directly through the maneuver. It does seem like they wanted prices to rise, though, to increase the barrier to competition.
It's almost like unregulated capitalism is a certain highway to oligarchy and authoritarianism.
It's also desirable for them because it decreases people building their own computers and pushing more people to buying premade ones they sell.
No, the endgame is for all the compute power to be in the cloud, and you rent time on their servers.
Everyone will just be running thin clients at home, with subscriptions if they need to do anything more than send an email
Yeah, they can be enforced by the power rangers across borders.
It's a pipe dream, sadly.
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.
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 :(
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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.
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.
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...
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.
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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.
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Or gpu prices or hdd/ssd prices that never recovered from the tsunami. Consumers just keep getting fucked.
Prices don't generally recover; any reason for a price rise is a reason to make it the new norm.
Used to be, competition would spring up and keep them in check, but now that the entire market is 6 companies in a trench coat, any new competitor would just be acquired or forced out of business with legal demands or supplier tampering.
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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.
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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.
https://pcpartpicker.com/list/XpFtXR
That setup would currently run for around $1730? Without investing into a monitor, or any peripherals like keyboard, mouse, etc and picking a relatively cheap psu/case/cooler combo.
Maybe I misunderstood but seems a far cry from €850.
Your prices are msrp for unused components.
On my local equivalent of ebay/amazon I can get a used 3080 10 GB for $390, ryzen 9 5900x $265, 32 GB DDR4 3200 mHz $170, new b550 mobo $80, 750w psu 80+ gold $70. $975 total. I didn't count anything else coz a lot of people already have those things from their old PCs and they're super cheep. For a full ~$1000 build add a $60 512 GB sata ssd. Cooler will set you back $15, same as a 1080p screen, case and m+k combo and a lot of the time you can get those things for free and they will last you a lifetime.
This is my first ever keyboard that I got for free from an office that was closing down and I use it to this day. Eventually I had to buy a PS/2 to USB dongle but that's like $5. I have a 2nd spare one in case the 1st one breaks. I plan on using it till I die.
I see the misunderstanding, didn’t consciously see the ‘used’ hardware in your post above. That makes a lot more sense!
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It’s just nonsense. Absolutely nonsense.
Next up: MSI, ASUS, ... are pulling out of the consumer market due to falling revenue causing major price hikes.
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At least people aren't buying at these high prices, wouldn't want them to stay there after all.
This is a good point, we don't need PCs to be this expensive.
I just hope we don't fuck up the whole thing and end up with cloud computers or end up not making new PCs..
I'm pretty convinced this is the play. Drive up DIY PC parts then promote thin cloud clients as a way to have a PC without paying the crazy prices that they set. It's a lot easier to tell you "it's safer for the children" and pillage every file, action, and keystroke for AI training and data brokerage. Your owned PC is a black box for them and it's their wet dream to own it for you... As a subscription of course.
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This is hilarious. Intel after many years finally fixed their manufacturing process, but won't be able to sell chips because of memory crunch
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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.
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