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

As an occasional builder with three kids I feel normal people have certainly been screwed over by the PC industry.

It's been like that since the whole mining scene with graphics cards to some degree. Once the industry found you could wrap dog **** in tin foil and some kid with money would pay for it, well GPU prices soared and all they needed was new letters and numbers to make more money out of nothing. Now look at it, we need fake frames from £800 GPU's with £700 on memory and will pay £300 more on a CPU because it's 4% faster at 1080p on CCSG. While contemplating a Gen5 NVMe that no one benefits from while justifying an upgrade to AM5 because Gen5 x16 GPU slots which we can't tell from Gen4 x8 slots.

And so the majority can play budget Steam games on a budget monitor.

Game developers develop crap, we cannot have budget £500 gaming PC's anymore meanwhile Xbox and Playstation are doing 120hz gaming at 4k and cost less than £500 and come with a £60 controller, and you need twice as much for a similar spec PC.
 
sastusbulbas said:
As an occasional builder with three kids I feel normal people have certainly been screwed over by the PC industry.

It's been like that since the whole mining scene with graphics cards to some degree. Once the industry found you could wrap dog **** in tin foil and some kid with money would pay for it, well GPU prices soared and all they needed was new letters and numbers to make more money out of nothing. Now look at it, we need fake frames from £800 GPU's with £700 on memory and will pay £300 more on a CPU because it's 4% faster at 1080p on CCSG. While contemplating a Gen5 NVMe that no one benefits from while justifying an upgrade to AM5 because Gen5 x16 GPU slots which we can't tell from Gen4 x8 slots.

And so the majority can play budget Steam games on a budget monitor.

Game developers develop crap, we cannot have budget £500 gaming PC's anymore meanwhile Xbox and Playstation are doing 120hz gaming at 4k and cost less than £500 and come with a £60 controller, and you need twice as much for a similar spec PC.
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I expect the price changes must have had an impact on the launch of the Steam machine. But even before the increases I still didn't see Steam having any way to price a decent PC under the price of a current console.
 
Skynet5 said:
Hopefully being all new.. replacement is managed by the supplier. If RAM doubles again i dont think i have to stump up the difference right?
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i found myself in that position during a previous RAM price hike. They (not OCUK) refunded me the peanuts i'd paid for the RAM which was no where near the amount it cost to replace it. It wouldn't surprise me if they RMAd it anyway, then sold the replacements again for more money.
No one will have your back.
 
champ222 said:
i found myself in that position during a previous RAM price hike. They (not OCUK) refunded me the peanuts i'd paid for the RAM which was no where near the amount it cost to replace it. It wouldn't surprise me if they RMAd it anyway, then sold the replacements again for more money.
No one will have your back.
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Surely that is your choice to make no? Thats pretty dirty of whoever it was.

If its the other big competitor then wish me luck. Just built today a brand new machine.

Only issue was this new 12pin gpu cable i hadnt pushed into the psu properly. Killed an hour checking everything, trying other things… other than the psu end of the cable!
 
I’m sure many will be in the same boat. I’d have never even had a look into PC gaming if these prices hit when I was a teen. Fortunately now the budget is willing if I’m still enjoying PC gaming.
 
Just built my youngest her first pc and the price difference for a reasonable spec, compared to the costs of my other two kids' rigs was shocking.

Mine - 2019: £2400 (AM4 2080Ti)

Eldest - 2020: £900 (AM4 5700XT)

Middle - 2023: £600 (AM4 but updated mine with a 7800XT and she got the hand-me-downs).

Youngest - 2025: £1800 (AM5 9060XT)

I could have saved some money by going AM4/secondhand, but it wasn't a huge enough difference to forego the benefits of latest gen & warranty.

I've got enough spare parts (CPU, DDR4, PSU & Motherboard) to hopefully cover the three AM4 rigs if anything goes pffft, but hopefully we've plenty of life left in them.
 
Built my first PC in 2019 with about £600, the main stars being a Ryzen 5 2600X, RX 480 (though I bought this in 2017) and 16GB of DDR4. Was a solid PC.

Fast forward to this year in June, I pulled the trigger on a completely brand new build with about £1800, which included a Ryzen 7 9700X, Pulse RX 9070 and 64GB of DDR5.

I was almost tempted to actually wait a few months for price drops, but decided not to do that and just purchased the parts in June. Honestly had I waited and entered this RAM/storage price fiasco, I would've cancelled this new build completely, as it would've been totally unaffordable and way over budget.

Definitely not looking to upgrade anytime soon, especially due to these insane prices, so hopefully this new build will last a good while. I am sure it will, as I've never been the type of person to upgrade every cycle or whatever anyway.
 
I gave up a few years ago upgrading.
It was all or nothing (ie new GPU, mobo, etc etc) and I decided on nothing as I just don't really enjoy gaming anymore.

I'm very glad of it now as costs are. Insane.
 
I don't want to give up building but I do feel the prices have pushed me away from building.
Whilst doom scrolling I saw a comment saying 8gb gpus will become the go to and game developers will have to follow suit. But with Valve and the steam machine round 2 I would be happy to jump over to that. Just as long as Valve don't introduce subscriptions to play games online even though you have purchased the game.
 
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RedMogg said:
9600X, but I've included peripherals in that figure, which has skewed it somewhat. Rig alone was closer to £1500.
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White theme or aesthetics heavy I'm guessing?

For a ballpark £1500 and a 9600X I'd expect a 9070XT, although they're starting to shoot up in price now too unfortunately.
 
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I feel that the industry has screwed over the average PC enthusiast (and end user in general) in the last couple of years and the blatant chase the money at the expense of making something good has frankly just made me think "I'm out". I've always accepted that the top end is just that and has a price to match, which is fair enough. But the raising of prices throughout the stack such that you don't get trickle down improvement at a given price point as much just leaves a bitter taste. Then, combined with the likes of Microsoft's direction over the last number of years ... I'm just not interested.

Some of the early computers in the house were BBC Micros and early IBM PS/2 machines ... so I've lived the advances of tech over the years. And although I fully realise the IT business was always wanting to make a profit, there used to be a feel for the real advancement and development and betterment of tech in doing that. Even Ryzen and Apple silicon re-kindled that interest for me in more recent years ... but as mentioned above, since mining, ai, subscription models, incessant ads, en-sh..tificaiton and the rest ... that feeling has just gone .. the only interest by tech is profit and money and how can they screw over the consumer more.

Over the last wee while, I've found myself moving to Apple, and away from the typical hobby PC scene. I could have put the money of my Apple machines into the PC hobby ... but a part of me thinks the other companies don't deserve the money. I also feel that the Apple eco-system, to me *** still has a flavour of trying to do and develop things that are more consumer focussed. I do feel that I've ended up with home setup which feels just more generally a little bit more useable and enjoyable overall.


*** I very much know there is a lot not to like about Apples eco-systems and hardware, so I'm not trying to be evangelical about it, or convince others to switch ... its just my current reflections and thoughts.
 
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The RAM prices really are killing it
I finally upgraded my PC in June last year after a 7 year run with my 8700K/RTX2080

The RAM was £95 for 32GB DDR5, its now £499.95 from same retailer, that's the same price as an Xbox series X !!!
 
mikemod said:
The RAM prices really are killing it
I finally upgraded my PC in June last year after a 7 year run with my 8700K/RTX2080

The RAM was £95 for 32GB DDR5, its now £499.95 from same retailer, that's the same price as an Xbox series X !!!
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Thankfully I bought 32GB when I built the system and that should be fine for a few years
 
Stick with 8gb sticks of RAM and away from Nvidia cards and prices remain relatively reasonable. Ignore RTX marketing and run 4x sticks of DRAM.
 
I've felt priced out of the hobby since the OG Kepler Titan landed (mine was a mistake purchase 9 months later but a good deal comparatively). Nvidia make this "the very best thing we can do" tech demo card and arbitrarily drop a £1,000 price tag on it, likely thinking "well, some people do buy the very best on principle" but was never intended to be an actual product. Yet the bloomin' thing sold like hot cakes.

And at that point the "fleece the sheep" floodgates opened.

The Titan wasn't the best they could do because cores were disabled. Manufacturing got improved slightly so we got the full-fat Titan Black (and 780 Ti). Also £1,000, also sold stupidly well.

Titan X Maxwell, Titan X Pascal, Titan Xp kept creeping the prices up and up and up because they sold. Then supposedly Turing wasn't getting a Titan so Nvidia priced the 2080 Ti at £1,500 for no fkn reason other than to fill that super expensive price point.

And then did a Titan RTX for 3 grand anyway.

The industry has priced normal people out because once the lion's share of components and supplies are directed to the latest tech fad, literal morons with more money than brains will pay multiple thousands for the few scraps that remain.
 
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