Anyone else feel they've been priced out of the PC hobby?

champ222

champ222

champ222

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Beds, UK
Hi All

I quite like to tinker with my PCs. Even if i dont need more performance for any specific reason, i love a new PC build, and changing things around is fun.

I currently have two systems:

1:
10600K
16GB DDR4, 3600 CL16
MSI MEG Z470I unify mini ITX board
6800XT Sapphire Pure (white)
White Meshlicious case
AIO for cooling
2x1TB M.2

2:
5600X
32GB DDR4, 3200 CL16
MSI B450I Gaming Plus AC
9070XT Reaper
Black Fractal Terra
2TB M.2 plus 1TB Sata

both were fun to build, and ive upgraded and changed a few bits and pieces over time. Most recently, i added the 2TB M.2 to the terra and moved the 1TB from there into the Meshlicious, replacing a 256GB SATA based drive. Before that, moved from a 3070 & 3080 to the AMD cards as the 16GB VRAM would be useful going forward.

i I used them in different locations, so having two PCs was handy. Going forward, i dont NEED two PCs so i had thought about, selling off all the parts from System 1, plus the board, ram and CPU from system 2, and getting a new AM5 system in the Terra case.

But now i'm not. I'm not paying £350 for 32GB ram. Not happening, so i wont buy anything else either. Now i'm thinking, i'll just keep both PCs, the boards are quite old on both so i'll have a backup i guess.

i had looked at upgrading the PCs. the ITX boards have only two RAM slots, so i'd need to buy 32GB (2x16GB) of DDR4. last week, i saw a few kits go for £75 ish, but most were £85 ish. This week, its more like £120! i can probably manage with 16GB.
Thought about upgrading the CPUS. best i can do on the intel system is 10900K i think. They cost around £160 ish used... not really sure its worth it look at gaming benchmarks. i5 was always the sweet spot. on AMD, WTF happened to the 5700X3D pricing? i should have bought one when they were £200 new. Now they are £300 ish used.

So yeah... i'm not going to be doing anything, as... whats the point?

I imagine many others are in similar situation. the RAM prices are going to be far reaching. Only a matter of time before GPU prices are off to the moon again. i can imagine that CPU and motherboard sales have already started dropping as people dont want to be paying for the RAM prices.

bloody AI nonsense... the billionaires are in a race to ruin the world. Nothing good will come from the AI investment... sigh
 
I said it in another thread but I do truly believe a lot of us could be looking at our last desktop PC builds on our desks/floors at home. The main thing holding up the PC components market is gaming and when people can't justify the expense for gaming, they move to console gaming or just stop gaming. Not many PCs are required for heavy desktop apps anymore outside gaming where a laptop won't do.

By the time prices recover - if they even ever do truly "recover" - we could be talking years down the line. By that point we will have aging systems, but they will still be very capable. The pursuit of continuous improvement in PC hardware has really been propped up by the gaming industry. We don't need more and more CPU/ram/GPU power to run day to day tasks, especially since so much compute is offloaded to cloud based apps now anyway.

I think this will change the market. Once more and more key game companies go under it could snowball and die out. People will probably hold on to their machines for legacy gaming for a number of years after perhaps.

The model doesn't work if consumers can't afford to buy. So either games will be made more in mind with existing or older hardware, or they will stop making games. Prices can't return to normal whilst the AI bubble grows. This could continue for years though.
 
I normally aim for a complete upgrade every 5 years on my main rig because I want to see a noticeable uplift in performance. I'm lucky in that I have a 5950k (rig not bought for gaming) so I can hang on a bit longer but I usually budget around 3k for the key parts of ram, cpu, nvme, motherboard, gpu along with hopefully some other parts thrown in that price too....3k doesn't exactly go far to start with when you're at the upper end of cpus etc lol... one third to half that is now ram, a third is the gpu (assuming nvidia doesn't push higher prices again)...

My planned upgrade time was end of next year after the next AMD cpu is released along with hopefully next gen gpus but I'm not even sure there will be any hardware to buy let alone be able to afford it.

I do kind of feel that we're being priced out of the market, almost on purpose now so we go for one of those streaming services that they want to sell us where we never own anything 'pc'.... they've seen the way everything else is subscription (I hate subscription software with a passion, even though I have office 365) and they want the same deal... why go for 1 payment plus in game purchases when you can go for monthly payments for the hardware, monthly or one time payment for the games and then in game purchases too....
 
champ222 said:
So yeah... i'm not going to be doing anything, as... whats the point?
Click to expand...

To be honest, your current PCs are just fine for gaming I don't think you've been priced out, one could have a faster GPU maybe.

What is actually pushing you for more than that besides a want rather than a need?

This is just a blip, like every other demand blip it will resolve in time.
 
Last edited:
i do follow the pc space, but i can't say that i upgrade every cycle (bar covid as there was not much else to do)
thankfully i've completed my latest upgrade cycle recently so i'm happy to sit out the next few years and eat my popcorn.jpg and see how the dust settles
 
not really helpful to your situation [although i will add my am5 upgrade thats about to happen was only possible due to pure blind luck lol]
that pure 6800xt how are you finding it? i have a thing about the sapphire pure series of gpus and now motherboards and the 6800xt is one
ive rarely seen or heard of before people owning and using i mean. i have a b850 motherboard a 9070xt and a 6500xt sapphire pure models
and im slowly becoming a sapphire pure **** lol
and yes if i hadnt luckily got my ram when and how i did i would be sticking on my am4 rig for a few more years i just got lucky
 
jaybee said:
I said it in another thread but I do truly believe a lot of us could be looking at our last desktop PC builds on our desks/floors at home. The main thing holding up the PC components market is gaming and when people can't justify the expense for gaming, they move to console gaming or just stop gaming. Not many PCs are required for heavy desktop apps anymore outside gaming where a laptop won't do.

By the time prices recover - if they even ever do truly "recover" - we could be talking years down the line. By that point we will have aging systems, but they will still be very capable. The pursuit of continuous improvement in PC hardware has really been propped up by the gaming industry. We don't need more and more CPU/ram/GPU power to run day to day tasks, especially since so much compute is offloaded to cloud based apps now anyway.

I think this will change the market. Once more and more key game companies go under it could snowball and die out. People will probably hold on to their machines for legacy gaming for a number of years after perhaps.

The model doesn't work if consumers can't afford to buy. So either games will be made more in mind with existing or older hardware, or they will stop making games. Prices can't return to normal whilst the AI bubble grows. This could continue for years though.
Click to expand...
Absolutely true. Though same could be said for laptops to a point. My work is thinking about updating the laptops as the sales guys are getting a bit whingey about it, like they dont get enough perks. i'll get an upgrade too (which i'll take) but my current laptop is perfectly serviceable, as is theirs. Its only gaming really that i need PC grunt for. internet and email and stuff has been fast enough for years now.
 
sandys said:
To be honest, your current PCs are just fine for gaming I don't think you've been priced out, one could have a faster GPU maybe.

What is actually pushing you for more than that besides a want rather than a need?

This is just a blip, like every other demand blip it will resolve in time.
Click to expand...
Yeah performance is fine really. Its just something i enjoy doing, messing about with hardware. I can actually find a bit of time for it, just another fun thing that's eroding away.
 
champ222 said:
Nothing good will come from the AI investment... sigh
Click to expand...

Over simplification - lots of good things will come, like any major change in history it takes time, there have always been investment bubbles doesn't mean the resultant output was not good.

champ222 said:
So yeah... i'm not going to be doing anything, as... whats the point?
Click to expand...

What is the point? Are you going to gain anything by changing? Perhaps invest in a better screen if you don't have a great OLED etc.
 
I flat out refuse to buy stuff at silly prices.
After all, overpayments on the mortgage or £1000 on a graphics card. Any sensible adult knows the answer to that.

Probably why I'm only on my 2nd pc build in about 15 years. My current one took quite a few months to assemble as I was waiting for decent prices on a couple of the components. I got a better power supply and graphics card than id originally planned for doing it.

My last one got second hand parts towards the end to keep it going.
 
mark 11:11 said:
not really helpful to your situation [although i will add my am5 upgrade thats about to happen was only possible due to pure blind luck lol]
that pure 6800xt how are you finding it? i have a thing about the sapphire pure series of gpus and now motherboards and the 6800xt is one
ive rarely seen or heard of before people owning and using i mean. i have a b850 motherboard a 9070xt and a 6500xt sapphire pure models
and im slowly becoming a sapphire pure **** lol
and yes if i hadnt luckily got my ram when and how i did i would be sticking on my am4 rig for a few more years i just got lucky
Click to expand...
Actually, its the 7800XT pure, not the 6800XT... i keep making that mistake. I bought it used and was looking for the 6800XT at the time, when it came up on here.
Its a fine card. not too thick. It does emit a strange noise, which sounds a bit like a noisy fan spinning up, but it isnt a fan. its not a big issue at all though. Its barely noticeable really, and could just be mine. Considering how much coil whine would drive me crazy, this is absolutely fine. i only hear it because the AIO is practically silent
I could probably fit it in the terra, just, but the 9070XT pure is three slots i think. it looks cool in white. just wish there wasnt such a premium for white hardware... and where are the cheap white keyboards? i need a full size keyboard, and i have no desire to spend loads on "gaming keyboards" when cheap logitech or microsoft keyboards do me fine. but its black or black.
 
hornetstinger said:
Take up another hobby?

In audio AVR's have gone up in price a lot, budget AVR's are no longer £150-£200.
Click to expand...
i got a new OLED TV last year, and thought about a new AV amp as existing one only passes 1080p and only has ARC (not EARC) and running it from the TV out, would mean a loss in audio quality as your restricted to "SPDIF" levels of audio. I looked at the marantz cinema 60 as i love the look and it gets good reviews. Though the Denon equivalent is probably a better buy. In the end i found a solution to send the EARC out from the TV into one of the AV amps normal inputs, so that is working well for me for the time being.
 
Journey said:
Over simplification - lots of good things will come, like any major change in history it takes time, there have always been investment bubbles doesn't mean the resultant output was not good.



What is the point? Are you going to gain anything by changing? Perhaps invest in a better screen if you don't have a great OLED etc.
Click to expand...
i'm sure there will be some edge cases, but the billionaires will become trillionaires and many jobs will be replaced by AI. so the gap between the richest and the regular people will become even greater. Ive two kids, 8 and 10. By the time they get old enough, houses will cost half a million quid. what are they going to do for work which AI cant do for free?

My screen is ok at the moment. I'd quite like an OLED but its a PC also used by the wife and kids for work etc. I'll make the switch at some point though as the OLED TV is really nice!
 
marinersfan said:
I flat out refuse to buy stuff at silly prices.
After all, overpayments on the mortgage or £1000 on a graphics card. Any sensible adult knows the answer to that.

Probably why I'm only on my 2nd pc build in about 15 years. My current one took quite a few months to assemble as I was waiting for decent prices on a couple of the components. I got a better power supply and graphics card than id originally planned for doing it.

My last one got second hand parts towards the end to keep it going.
Click to expand...
i buy most of my stuff used. Though i tend to buy GPUS etc new as i want a warranty on something that costs that much.

Youre right though, i need to save for a house extension, so that is a better use of money... its a drop in the ocean though with current extension prices.
 
champ222 said:
i got a new OLED TV last year, and thought about a new AV amp as existing one only passes 1080p and only has ARC (not EARC) and running it from the TV out, would mean a loss in audio quality as your restricted to "SPDIF" levels of audio. I looked at the marantz cinema 60 as i love the look and it gets good reviews. Though the Denon equivalent is probably a better buy. In the end i found a solution to send the EARC out from the TV into one of the AV amps normal inputs, so that is working well for me for the time being.
Click to expand...

I made do with a while BD--->4K--->optical to old non HDMI AV pre for a while until I updated

So had 4k HDR video playback with DD/DTS.
 
hornetstinger said:
I made do with a while BD--->4K--->optical to old non HDMI AV pre for a while until I updated

So had 4k HDR video playback with DD/DTS.
Click to expand...
That probably would have been fine to be honest. Though there are reports of audio sync issues with LGs and SPDIF, but I didnt actually try it. I use an apple tv 4k for everything (I'm not an apple guy normally) it's really good
 
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