I generally upgrade my PC every five years. This usually means new motherboard, CPU, and RAM, and this last time a case as well. The last time I did it was in 2019, not counting the brief window where I was able to purchase an RTX 3080 at or near MSRP in around 2022. Not only am I overdue for an upgrade, my needs have changed pretty drastically since 2019.

Back then I was all about RGB, and sought to create the quintessential unicorn vomit PC. While I still like the aesthetic, I now know that maintenance of all that RGB can be a hassle. You need to manage more cables, and components on LED strips can fail, ruining the look of the case. The case is made of mostly tempered glass, but It's now on the floor, obviously not ideal. The PC isn't the only rig on my desk now (ham radios are also called rigs), and the PC has to share space with three or four of them, all with power, coax, grounding wire, and control cables of their own.

First it was crypto, now it's AI.

Two stupid fucking things we never wanted.

Fuck every crypto bro and every AI enthusiast.

I feel bad for people working in manufacturing for parts like cases or cooling systems. When nobody builds PCs anymore, nobody buys their products either and they go out of business for good.

This whole AI mess is killing gaming as we know it.

I'm surprised that so many (40%) have plans to build a new PC in next two years. Especially because we are talking about PC Gamers, who are already PC Gamers. I would assume that most either do not, or upgrade instead build a new PC. From those 40% of 1.5k tomshardware readers who participated in the survey, I wonder in what state their PC are and if they HAVE to build a new PC or they just have a lot of money around and can afford it. Do they sell the old system or parts of it? Unfortunately these are unanswered at the moment.

The other 39% are optimistically hoping the bubble will pop within that 2 years and there will still be a market to buy from.

I have no such illusions - but a bit of me wonders if, possibly, this may drive the pc market back in the direction of its origins:

Devs were incentivised to write more efficient, leaner code because resources were expensive.

PC users focused on squeezing every. goddamn. drop. of performance out of their existing gear. Overclocking wasnt about making your 200 fps into 300 - it was about making that aging beast play something it had no right to even run.

I dont look forward to the coming days with any optimism... but maybe this whole scene needed a purging fire to foster new growth and diversity.

Or maybe we'll just purge the source of these issues. Or both. Both would be nice. I can dream.

hopefully this wont end with pc component market drying completely so companies can force us to use their stupid remote pc crap.

This box better not break anytime soon lmaooo

It's not like we didn't have a near infinite amount of games available from retro 8bit games all the way to the latest and greatest. Honestly, there's enough games or there that don't require high end PCs to play.

Heck, I got a long ass list of games I bought nearly 10 years ago that I haven't ended played yet because I bought so many. On PC and Switch!

I'm good.

I upgraded my 8 year rig right when Trump was elected thinking tariffs would screw me. Did not forsee AI being the bigger factor

It's hard to believe that my PC build in 2023 was $1000 and now it is upwards of $2100 (some parts have no price available).

I run my boxes for so long I end up having to basically build a whole new rig by the time it is obsolete thanks to socket, RAM and GPU changes. Feels like it almost defeats the purpose of rolling your own. I mostly just use my Steam Deck at this point. Tired of keeping up with all that combined with shortages.

I started putting together a RAID, got the housing and the first drive, the plan was to buy a drive with each paycheck until I had the 4 drives I need. The first drive was like $250, arrived last week. Then I checked the price this week and the same drive is now $650.

I'm rocking a 14 year old CPU (3570k), 16gb of DDR3 and a gtx1070 (non-ti).

I was so god damn stoked to build a new machine this year, only to watch first ddr5 then ddr4 soar our of my price range...

Now even the used stuff around me is jumping in price, with mobo cpu ram deals getting scooped up only for the ram to pop back up at twice the price the next day.

Fuck AI.

builds a new PC.

continues to play Half Life 2.

Fractal North is still the prettiest PC case I've ever seen. I'm very happy with mine.

My rig is 10y old but it doesn’t actually feel all that old thanks to Linux; I also play mostly 2d games so that probably helps. Needless to say I’m overdue for an upgrade but that prob won’t happen anytime soon now :(

It's wild, like people get into things when there is novelty and affordability and then leave when one of those goes away.

My biggest question now is, what will supplant PC building/other super high end stuff? I grew up on Halo and early CoDs, but now that I'm old and suck at video games (particularly online multiplayer), and seeing a huge shift toward battle royale and dark souls style gameplay, I felt like I was long overdue to start reading more/working out more/hiking/etc.

"60% of gamers have no plans to build a computer for the foreseeable future." The unspoken part is, "and the hardware manufacturers don't care". Maybe they will after the bubble pops, or maybe not.

I just bought a mini desktop-- Ryzen 5 with 16Gb memory and 1Tb SSD. It cost me almost $500US. It probably was $100 less last year. I'm not a gamer, but I do make heavy use of 3D CAD and sometimes with large assemblies. And my old Nitro 5 and 1650 nVidia had been starting to struggle.

I do like my new little computer, with Aurora 44 installed, win11 was aborted on first boot, it's a snappy little box despite the modest specs. The downside is, there isn't enough time to make a cuppa tea while waiting on a model regen.

And who knows, I may live long enough to afford another stick of ram, or I may win the lottery someday-- assuming I buy a lottery ticket first.

My rig still runs all of my favorite 2D indie games, so I'm good.

I'm ready to be on ye ole am4 for at least another decade..... I see no reason to upgrade any time soon. If prices crash in 27 or 28 and upgrading to am5 became financially realistic id consider it but I realistically just don't see that happening

I know is probably not possible, but I wish a competitor manufacturer would rise during this times and when the bubble pops we would let these worms starve.

At this rate I will end up downgrading when something breaks instead and just turn graphics down a bit.

Dodged the crypto gold rush twice by managing to buy my GPUs before they happened. The last hard drive purchase was more than a year ago, a 2TB Seagate to replace a damaged one. The PC I'm on now was built four years ago, and the most pricey upgrade was getting a 5700X3D.

Now I think I'll have to be more careful while I use my PC, because we're back to 1995 pricing.

I upgraded my PC just in time last year before pricing went bonkers. Stayed on my AM4 board, upgraded to 64GB DDR4, swapped my ageing 2600x to an 5950x with 32 cores, snatched a 5070 to expand my smallish VRam, upgraded storage to a total of 43TB.

I'm still in the market for 4 8-16TB HDDs, since I have a very nice NAS standing in a corner. But I will probably opt for used drives with the current prices.

Next PC upgrade is the first time in a long while I have to actually replace the whole PC, but I'll ride out this Madness first.

Glad I upgraded mine before all this shit started. Barring disaster it should play games for years. I don't need all the bells and whistles.

We sold our last desktop before doing a huge move and bought a temp laptop. Now we’re unable to get a desktop because of pricing. Our last desktop cost about 750usd to build and it was pretty good specs for the time. Now the same parts would be 1500… bruh and we wanted to upgrade the whole system… seems like we’ll have to make our temporary laptop semi permanent

25% plan to buy this year. 40% in the next two years.

RAM prices have quadrupled since this time last year. So if only 25% as many people buy this year than last year, then the line still went up for the RAM companies.

This is a huge windfall for them, and there is absolutely zero reason for them to go back to $75/32GB DDR5 kits.

Shame that nobody is capable of restraint...