Yesterday I did a price check on the PC I built two years ago. It went from $2300 to $3650. The bulk of that increase was that the ram went from $210 to $940. Its now more expensive than when DDR5 was new.
The value of my desktop pc has almost doubled, my ps5 is worth ~ $150 more than I bought it years ago.
It's gotten to the point where nvidia doesn't even bother to report their gaming revenue anymore. It's a clear sign that we're back to the bad old days of pc gaming being a 'prosumer' hobby, but don't worry I'm sure nvidia and their ilk are salivating at the idea of making pc gaming into a streaming stadia like solution that you pay for monthly
I think I paid a total of around $5,500 for the current components of my PC. Hard to say for sure since my PC has been a Ship of Theseus for over 30 years and started as a 486. The link merely reflects its current state.
At one point, PCPartPicker was showing my PC as worth $11,000. It's now at $7,200 without including the RAM or PSU. That would put it at $9,000.
> It's a clear sign that we're back to the bad old days of pc gaming being a 'prosumer' hobby
Yup.
I think it's especially bad since the gap between budget-grade and mid-grade feels like it's gotten wide. If you wanna play the latest AAA games and not feel like you need to upgrade in 3 years, you can't settle for the budget grade unless you're still gaming at 1080p.
I wouldn't recommend spending under $3,000 for a gaming PC these days, and that's just an absurd price.
You can get a $200 to $300 microcenter cpu+motherboard+16GB DDR5 bundle [1], then $300-$400 GPU, and you'll be able to play nearly every game on the market just fine at 1080p.
I'm sure there are pre-builts using stockpiled RAM that are similar $1000 price range.
And if you buy used you can do even better. $300-400 might get you a 5060 or a 9060XT right now [2][3] but if you go used you can get something like a 3080 instead.
I play games at 1080p with a 1660 Ti and, outside of some newer UE5 games that heavily rely on frame gen for performance (Monster Hunter Wilds performance was too poor to play), everything I've thrown at it has been playable and some games even 100+ FPS.
There's not necessarily anything wrong with gaming at 1080p, but I shudder to recommend anyone use a 1080p display for productivity. I feel like 27" 1440p is a good minimum experience. I also think that you're doing yourself a disservice going with an 8GB gpu in 2026, even for 1080p
I get to spend less and still play any game at max, and I can actually run 2 instances of some heavy games for local coop using Nucleus (Nightreign specifically).
I use Niri as my desktop environment on linux, zero need for 4k.
My screen is 27'' since 8 years ago when i bought it
Hard disagree. Once I went 4K, I could never go back to 1080p.
Sure, in an action-packed scenes of close- to moderate-quarters combat, I don't really notice it.
But in long-distance combat? Having 4x the pixels per square inch is noticeable. In slower scenes and cut scenes it's definitely an appreciable improvement.
I had a 4K 26 inch monitor and yes it was nice. But I travel too much and didn't enjoy moving it from place to place. Gave it to a good friend that I was visiting. Missed it for a little bit but quickly got used to using laptop screen. It is to the point that even if I'm in a hotel room with a large monitor/screen I usually don't bother to connect to it.
My point. Once you get better things yes it's easy to think you could never use the lesser tools you once had. But if the incentives are there, it's really not that difficult to adapt.
Yeah. 4K is nice for text, but doesn't seem like a great deal for gaming given the 4x hardware requirement and/or weirdo interpolation technologies that may or may not work on AMD + Linux anyway.
4k is really nice for text. Always annoyed by 1080p screens for work. But yeah gaming - 1080p is fine. I have a 9060 XT and I play games at 4k like Mortal Kombat X, Fallout 4, Evil Within 2, Dead Space Remastered and Wolfenstein: The New Colossus. All 60+ fps on Linux and an ancient cpu.
Doom: The Dark Ages is 1440p and still looks great.
Total waste of money paying so much more for a gpu unless you want local ai, and those weirdo interpolation technologies are a pain in the a* to get working.
> I wouldn't recommend spending under $3,000 for a gaming PC these days
Alternative wording: You recommend to spend more than $3000? There are people out there who don't toss money around as if it's an endless commodity. I spent a friction of that for gaming computers in my entire life.
I'm just trying to imagine what I would tell a younger cousin who was still in highschool. I'm not sure I could recommend they get into pc gaming the way things are now, and that makes me sad.
I think modern rendering techniques need more pixels. 1440p should be considered bare minimum, and 4K the norm. Unfortunately, the prices are what they are.
On the flipside, being a low-spec gamer is better than ever. Indies, oldies, mods... all in great shape.
The most I've ever replaced all at once is the CPU/mobo/RAM trifecta. But even when I do that, I still kept the same storage, case, GPU, PSU, mouse/keyboard, etc.
But otherwise, upgrades are piecemeal. New storage when my current storage is full or I want to upgrade to a new technology. New GPU when I feel like my current one is holding me back. New mouse or keyboard when my current one starts failing. The CPU/mobo/RAM trifecta when the performance gains make it worthwhile, which at this point is about every 5 years.
I guess most would probably assume at least one epic refresh where there wasn't really anything carried across except maybe the parking spot on your desk. And since the 486 era, most probably expect your desk and/or physical site changed too.
There were so many potential PC era boundaries like case and motherboard form factors, external peripheral buses, HDD controller types, expansion card buses, cooling and PSU demands, socket/RAM formats, display types, and display connection types, ...
So many opportunities to think, "this seems like a time for a clean slate." If for no other reason than to bring up the new computer and have the old continue in transition or as some kind of spare, backup, or hand-me-down.
Did you mod the case? I can't imagine a case designed for a 486 would be super great for thermals for a modern CPU and discrete GPU combo. For me, it was such a pain in the butt to try and mod it vs. $100 for a case that "just works", so that was the nail in the coffin for my old AT case.
As much as I hate to say it, the move at this point is GeForce Now, at least for the time being... I just subscribed to the 200 USD/year Ultimate plan with a free 007 game. My ping to the datacenter is a mere 5ms, with 5080, RTX, 4k@60Hz (which my projector can drive) I am getting way more performance and similar latency than I would if I were using my own, semi-affordable rig or even a PS5. It's mind-blowing, really, and I recommend anyone to at least give it a try.
If I take out the cost of that 007 game, that plan i 140 USD a year. If you consider the cost of the electricity, it alone would likely cover it. In the past one would typically include hardware depreciation cost in such calculations to drive the point home...but the 3-4k USD I am not spending spending on a similar rig alone can generate me some 100-150 USD in bank over a year – not to mention the inflation! So, all in all, it's basically free, comparatively speaking.
It makes economic sense. A lot of my gaming happens on GeForce Now.
At home, I am still rocking a plain old GTX 1080 with an i7 6700k, it's still kicking ass a decade later and plays most of what I throw at it, and I have an M-Series MBP for work, though it's capable of running plenty modern titles on Ultra.
My Steam Deck absorbs the majority of my local gaming, however, even though I have to run games at lower spec. It's just an extremely convenient device and I dock it to my projector, which I run at 1080p@240Hz anyway because I prefer it over 4K@60Hz.
For things the deck can't handle though, GeForce Now rocks. If the Steam Machine doesn't become too expensive, I might snag one and a Steam Frame headset as well, and that will probably have me set through any impending breakdown in the supply chain for at least a decade. I'll probably be rocking this GTX 1080 until 2040, the way things are going.
Sorry buddy, I am not gonna singlehandedly spend 5k on a similar rig just to fight a fight I can't win. This happened to a lot of fields in IT and it's inevitably happening to gaming, too.
Also, gaming does not equal computer ownership. Majority of gamers use consoles, anyway. Gaming PCs are niche nowadays.
I routinely use it over a 5G mobile connection, often while moving, far from any datacenter, and it's usually fine as long as my signal is good. They do a fantastic job out of squeezing what they can from your connection.
I'm actually some 200 miles from the data center, but Nvidia has been doing a stellar job in connecting to the backbones of all the major ISPs around. If I actually lived down the road from them, it would be as low as 1 to 2ms, as reported by plenty of users. This isn't uncommon, especially in the EU.
I thought I read that Samsung SATA SSDs were discontinued, but apparently that was a rumor and Sansung has denied it. I wonder why they exceed NVMe prices. They're the only SATA drives left with DRAM. I guess they could just be milking that fact.
Well boo-hoo. It's about time more people got to know what it's like not to be on the bleeding edge. I've always had second-hand computers and only once bought myself a new laptop, the asus EeePC after the price dropped.
Ten years from now I'll get to watch inception in 4K.
A few weeks ago I needed a computer to be a Debian server for some at-home simple Web dev / learning stuff. I bought an HP Prodesk 400 G3 SFF PC with i5-6500, 8GB RAM and a 256GB off a popular auction site for £44. It'll do. I might upgrade to 16GB. An additional 8GB stick costs £19.
Good work. I bought an AMD Ryzen 3 3100 for €35 with shipping. A Radeon W5500 would set me back €150 at the moment. 16 GiB of RAM another €90. And that's on a relatively cheap site in my country.
I bought a 5090 12 months ago, just checked - that’s basically up 50%! I used to joke i’d retire on all the old tech in my loft, everyday now it feels less like a joke!
The memory in the PC I put together early last year is now worth about three times the total cost of all the parts I used to build the thing. It is absolutely crazy.
Memory is still a commodity product, in that there isn't a huge amount of difference between vendors selling products that comply with a certain technical standard. Sometimes the prices of commodities (wheat, silver, crude oil, etc) go way up when supply and demand get out of balance.
I'm still flying under the radar with a Dell Precision T5820. 128GB of DDR4 and a Quadro P4000 graphics card (8gb). Handles everything I need it to do including photo/video editing, and some random FPS games without any issues.
I was thinking of upgrading the video card to something better, but looking at the cost of replacing that Quadro? I might just stay put for now. Costs on those have also pretty much doubled.
I regret not building the PC when I was looking at it. It's not a money thing, at the end of the day, but I can't bring myself to do it.
I had it all priced out, but a bunch of birthdays in my family were coming up and I felt like I shouldn't buy something for myself if it's really their time.
My old laptop will have to cut it for a while. :-)
Similar situation—just as I was about to buy, an emergency occurred, and when I came back two months later my ₹1,00,000 build was ₹1,20,000, and I felt I couldn’t quite justify it any more. And after all, my laptop had stabilised and no longer seemed to be dying like it had been a year earlier. Well, now my build would be ₹1,75,000 and feeling even less justified.
Pre-built PCs are the way to get a deal right now. The price of individual components is much more expensive than buying something from Micro Center or one of the Chinese integrators.