I went from thinking about a full rig upgrade, to just buying the best used processor and GPU my am4 board could handle with my current PSU and ddr4 ram.
Went from a ryzen 1600x and a Nvidia 1060 to a ryzen 5 5600x and a Radeon rx 6600 xt. I’ll be able to ride that out for a few years no problem.
The artificial price hikes actually saved you money. Noice!
Nnnoooo, you won’t get enough fps to enjoy your games!!!
/s in case some of you don’t get it
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.
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.
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.
Somebody pop the zit that is AI.
AI isnt a zit, its a giant infected boil and blister now.
I don’t disagree lance that green puss filled cavity.
what if we cannibalize our long-term viability for a short-term gain says every dipshit in charge of tech hardware manufacturing.
That’s every company, most upper management don’t stay in one position for more than 2 years. So the system is setup for short term gains because investors aren’t interested in long term investments and the blowback is the next guys problem. Who then is looking for the next big win to cover up the last guy issues without fixing anything. Then they bring in someone to clean up the mess and the cycle starts again.
Plus most consumers have short memories or don’t have an alternative so their stuck. There are small groups holding on but for 75% of the world’s population right now it’s Android or iOS, AMD or Intel, AMD or NVIDIA, Samsung or WD or Seagate or SanDisk, Att or Verizon, Apple or Microsoft, and so on.
Also your reputation. I had a Crucial SSD and was days from getting an identical one as a backup but then they said they were stopping consumer RAM sales so they’re now on my blacklist.
you know when the bubble pops and they no longer have AI companies buying RAM they will switch back to consumers and keep the high prices.
Absolutely
if they’re still around when the financial shell game they’re playing finally comes to a stop. who am i kidding the government will bail them out.
Using your money.
Profits for me, losses for thee
That only works if we (the collective we) have more money. If a rich person has more $$ than a small country that means the effect we have is equivalent.
That’s why micron is doing what its doing. We are no longer the customer. They voted for us.
if the US government were actually funded by taxes, then everything the government does would be with “my money”
Well, if you’re a citizen, the country is yours, and the government is there to manage it, but some assholes in power managed to convince people that it’s the other way around
Of course, not all the companies survive and now there’s decreased competition, so we can shove prices up a little bit further
Every business is doing this for everything. To different degrees but they are all chasing their “get our fortune now and get the fuck out because the sky is falling” mentality. Have been since Trump 1.0 and now it’s accelerating rapidly.
You have to remember that “get that bag” is practically inherit to business. We spend a lot of time and effort making it illegal to fuck people over and do bad business stuff, but kinda-sorta since Regan the businesses have slowly been winning that battle.
how are they in control? market demand is an outside force
Time to buy an AM5 MOBO to upgrade in 2028 then.
Just in time for AM6.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 do, but perhaps they haven’t expanded yet into your market. I see some here sometimes.
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?
As opposed to the US, where they get free slaves from China AND the state.
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.
Wonder if we’ll be getting consumer grade SoCs that are CPUs with integrated RAM.
We’ll be getting the opportunity to rent low-powered cloud computers at premium prices, and if you want to keep your data that costs extra.
“You’ll own nothing and like it.”
If things get that bad, I’ll just have to change my hobbies up and ditch tech as much as I can. I’ll buy used and try to wait this out first.
