[Sohcahtoa82]

https://pcpartpicker.com/user/Sohcahtoa82/saved/n76zkL

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.

[Brybry]

There's nothing wrong with 1080p gaming though.

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.

[1] https://www.microcenter.com/site/content/bundle-and-save.asp...

[2] https://pcpartpicker.com/products/video-card/#c=594,593&sort...

[3] https://pcpartpicker.com/products/video-card/#c=596&sort=pri...

[wing-_-nuts]

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

[SapporoChris]

How do you reconcile your comment with the fact that computers were used productively for decades before the invention of 1080p and larger formats.

[bigfatkitten]

Because decades ago, applications didn’t waste anywhere near the absurd amounts of screen real estate that they do now.

Look at how much you can fit onto a 1920x1080 display running Windows 2000 compared with a recent release of GNOME.

[Sohcahtoa82]

Screens got larger and higher resolution, and UX engineers decided we should fill the extra real estate with white space because...reasons? Because they're trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator that finds more than 3 elements on their screen confusing?

Bring back skeuomorphic design. Make buttons look like buttons again.

[acdha]

We also have decade of studies showing that one of the best ways to boost productivity is to give people more screen real estate. This was true in the 80s, it was true in the 90s, and it didn’t really seem to plateau until something like 5-6K displays. The only reason people didn’t use bigger displays back then was due to the cost — a friend’s dad ran a prints go in the 90s and he really benefited from a display big enough to fit a whole page legibly, but that and an 11x17 printer cost enough that he needed a small business loan to buy them. He could justify it on productivity grounds but most people just accepted the hit.

[tree-hugger]

Do you have links to any of these studies? I'm curious since it does not align with my personal experience, I find myself most productive on my single 720p screen -- perhaps I am missing something?

[acdha]

It varies from task to task, and operating system support is a confound, but basically it comes down to how often you have to scroll or switch windows to do whatever you are working on. For example, a print designer might do best with a single monitor large enough to hold the full document they’re working on at comfortable resolution while a programmer might be limited by having their editor and something like a debugger, browser, simulator, etc. simultaneously usable so two monitors might be better than one big one until it’s so big that those all fit.

https://www.jonpeddie.com/news/jon-peddie-research-multiple-...

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1375718

http://infovis.cs.vt.edu/oldsite/papers/Shupp-HCI.pdf

[saltcured]

Approximately the same way we reconcile with centuries of scribes being productive with quills and velum?

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

Happy 1080p poweruser and gamer here.

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

[Sohcahtoa82]

> There's nothing wrong with 1080p gaming though.

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.

[SapporoChris]

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.

[Sohcahtoa82]

> 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.

Basically the same specs here. 4K, 27".

How often were you traveling with it? I go to a PC gaming event twice/year (PDXLAN) and bring it. I don't think it's that bad moving it to the event venue and back.

> Once you get better things yes it's easy to think you could never use the lesser tools you once had.

You're probably right.

[rasz]

You really need 4K to appreciate all the hallucinated details in games.

[ahartmetz]

>There's nothing wrong with 1080p gaming though

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.

[jansommer]

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.

[dayjaby]

> 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.

[wing-_-nuts]

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.

[ahartmetz]

I would say there's a ton of great games made >= 5 years ago, almost all still available, and cheap :)

[jopsen]

The games from 15-25 years ago are also great, especially the ones still available those are the good games.

CS 1.5, OpenTTD, AoE2, the likes..

Fancier graphics doesn't make games better. Gameplay, stories and jokes do.

[Sohcahtoa82]

Fancy graphics won't make a bad game good, but they'll make a great game into a cinematic masterpiece.

Examples: Cyberpunk 2077 (Once all the bugs were worked out, I recognize it was dogshit on release), Baldur's Gate 3, Expedition 33. Would they be great games even with 15-year old graphical fidelity? Sure. But the stunning graphics definitely elevates the experience, especially in the case of Cyberpunk 2077. When you have the hardware to run everything maxed out, it's damn nearly photographic. It made me truly feel immersed in the game world in a way no other game has achieved, and I've played lots of VR games.

[ahartmetz]

Also, fancy 2D graphics were possible decades ago. Only fancy 3D graphics have serious requirements for today's hardware.

[stodor89]

> unless you're still gaming at 1080p

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.

[nekooooo]

you've 'upgraded' the same pc since a 486? i really can't believe that unless you're counting your mouse and keyboard.

[Sohcahtoa82]

> you've 'upgraded' the same pc since a 486?

Yes.

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'm not sure why this is hard to believe.

[saltcured]

I get it, the Beige Box of Theseus.

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.

[Sohcahtoa82]

> There were so many potential PC era boundaries like case and motherboard form factors

Only one change really from AT/Baby AT to ATX. We've been on ATX now for 30 years. I could grab an A-Bit BH6 motherboard from 1998 and put it in my modern Hyte Y60 case if I wanted to.

> external peripheral buses

Since we're talking starting from 486 era, that only means going from PS/2 to USB for keyboard/mouse, parallel port for your printer, maybe serial port for a modem. During the transition period, adapters were cheap and common.

> HDD controller types, [..], display connection types.

I don't know about the ESDI to IDE transition, but I know from IDE/PATA to SATA there was a period where motherboards had both. During the transition from VGA to DVI, then DVI to DisplayPort, GPUs had both.

> cooling and PSU demands

If you overbuy on the PSU a little, you can get a ton of futureproofing. CPUs came with stock coolers until just a few years ago.

> socket/RAM formats

Which is why the CPU/mobo/RAM upgrade was typically done as a trifecta.

> So many opportunities to think, "this seems like a time for a clean slate."

Never felt the need. As mentioned above, there was frequently a transition period for when hardware supported both old and new tech.

[pjjpo]

Can see moving parts into a new case as being just a transition, and then replacements from there continuing the treadmill.

But it would have been much cooler if you were still on the 486 era case :D

[rasz]

>ESDI to IDE transition

ESDI and ST-506 MFM/RLL before it lived in universe of dedicated HDD interface cards.

[saltcured]

And for the more prosumer level, there were (non-RAID) SCSI controllers with big fat cables before there was eventually SATA.

[saltcured]

Yeah, I guess I have a longer view since our first IBM compatible PC was a 286 based XT form factor. And in households with multiple computer users, upgrades could look more like mitosis (or nuclear decay?), with some parts splitting off to form new computers and less clear lineage of one computer just mutating.

The buses I was thinking of included ISA, EISA, VLB, PCI, PCIe. Yes there were ways to carry some things across since motherboards often had a couple bus types at once. But in my experience, the older peripheral cards often just got retired as they became either obsolete concepts or totally integrated in the next motherboard. I.e. you once commonly had serial port and parallel port expansion cards, game controller cards, sound cards, disk controller cards, and basic 2D graphics cards.

Cases also got smaller because the motherboards needed less space, people needed fewer expansion cards, and also because people needed fewer and fewer "drive bays". In the early days, you saw both 5.25" and 3.5" floppy drives, CD-ROM drives, big chunky HDDs, and possibly other weird removable media drives. Now you can easily have a capable corporate-style PC with no expansion cards, and no drives other than the M.2 stuck into the motherboard.

On the external side, I can think of PS/2, serial, parallel, USB, external SCSI, Firewire, e-SATA. Some of these coexisted with USB until it became high speed enough to subsume them. With graphics there was VGA, composite video, DVI, DisplayPort. Sound had 3.5mm, coax, toslink, coax digital. Communications commonly had POTS modem, coax ethernet, twisted pair ethernet. Somewhat esoteric were WiFi and bluetooth adapters. These could be on dedicated expansion cards, integrated into sound/graphics/comms cards, or integrated into the motherboard.

There were also weird expansion cards that paired with a particular external device, like a scanner or Hercules monochrome monitor. And more unusual cards like video-capture and digital TV or radio tuners.

The PSU issue wasn't just overall wattage but different set or balance of voltage rails and kinds of internal connectors needed for powered components. And shifts like standby power/soft-off behaviors.

I also recall AT to ATX and later uATX. Earlier motherboards were massive with socketed DRAM and SRAM chips and lots of simpler logic chips all over. They just kept shrinking as everything got more highly integrated. If you ever got a surplus Dell you might have encountered BTX too, which was like the left-handed universe.

I also had a phase with two uATX cases and almost had a "two space garbage collection" upgrade cycle, shifting parts in, between them, and out. One was my desktop PC and the other a "media PC" attached to TV and home stereo.

Some folks like me had a phase of trying to accelerate the down-sizing, abandoning our ATX/uATX for things like the Shuttle XPC mini/bookshelf computer formats. This meant more incompatible chassis, motherboard, and PSU formats. For me, a computer after 2000 was case/PSU + mobo/CPU/RAM + disk. The disk was either a single HDD/SSD or small software RAID array. At one time, we needed multiple disks for capacity, but now it can just be one or two M.2 drives on the motherboard and no disk bays at all.

This also leads to periodically thinking just a laptop will suffice, and then that becomes another thing that sees little upgrade and carry forward over longer time periods...

[Sohcahtoa82]

> Yeah, I guess I have a longer view since our first IBM compatible PC was a 286 based XT form factor.

The first time I used a PC was an Amiga in 1989. As my username implies, I was only 7 years old at the time.

My first IBM-compatible PC was a 486, I think in 1993. My dad got a used one and bought some multimedia kit that included a CD-ROM drive and audio card (Likely Sound Blaster, or at the very least, Sound Blaster compatible). Played a bunch of Stellar 7 and King's Quest, but also got into DOOM and Master of Orion.

That 486 was the start of the Ship of Theseus PC, though I didn't play a part in replacing parts until 1999 when I was 17 and bought a new hard drive with the money from my first job. Until then, my dad did the upgrades, but I always watched with great interest.

> Some folks like me had a phase of trying to accelerate the down-sizing, abandoning our ATX/uATX for things like the Shuttle XPC mini/bookshelf computer formats.

The tiny form factors like uATX and ITX never really interested me. Even when I started going to LAN events, I preferred a normal sized PC, even though my current rig probably weighs like 30-35 lbs. My GPU alone is like 3 lbs, and the Hyte Y60 case is 21 lbs empty.

> This also leads to periodically thinking just a laptop will suffice

I could never. My demands for being able to upgrade, not to mention to have something aesthetically pleasing, are too much for a laptop. I don't even have a laptop for casual use.

[QuiEgo]

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.

[Sohcahtoa82]

I've upgraded cases along the way, too.

Usually for aesthetics though. Better airflow was secondary until more recently.