5 ms·

Here's an excuse not to upgrade: holy fuck it's horribly expensive these days.

yellow_lead 4y ago
If it's something you use for work, the time saved could be justified if you have to compile or do something CPU-heavy often
- ohgodplsno 4y ago
  Unfortunately, it is hard, especially at an individual scale to say "I'm going to save up these $4000 over the next year and a half in productivity". Doubly so if you're just salaried and your pay will come, whether you use the shitty company laptop that takes 15 minutes to build or your crazy home rig. I'd love for me to be able to just run all my builds on full blast on a 24 core beast at home, but if your interests also include games, you're looking at multiple thousands just to upgrade. Needless to say, my apartment, family, vacations and a dozen other things are well above in the priority list.
  - wpm 4y ago
    I upgraded to an X670E platform back in October. CPU+Mobo+RAM ran me up to $750 with a bundle from Microcenter (essentially, I got the RAM for free), and I reused my case and power supply. To upgrade to a "24 core beast", as close as you can get with the 7000 series is the 7950X (16C/32T), which I can get on Amazon for $550, minus the aftermarket price for my 7700X (and possibly my old rig, which was a Z170 intel platform). Even if I kept my old processor, a top of the AMD line rig costs about $1250, memory capacity not withstanding. Of course, that says nothing about the additional electricity costs, and I understand that my prices are not obtainable in most of the world unfortunately, but I think $4000 is a stretch unless you needed a load of RAM (it'd be about $600 to max out my motherboard to 128GB).
    - ohgodplsno 4y ago
      Assuming you do not get deals: * $500 for a CPU (7800X starts at $450) * $60 for a cooler because the Wraith Prism is shit. * $200 for a motherboard, maybe $100 if you want to try to cheap out and get something that might have unstable voltages, shit PCIe bandwidth or no NVMe slots, etc. * $200 for 32GB of quality DDR5-4800 (or 5600 if you want to be fancy), and that's easily used up these days. * $200 for a quality 750W power supply * $100 for a case with good enough airflow, assuming you don't already have one. * $200+ for at least 1TB of NVMe storage, easily much more So, assuming a new build that didn't get incremental upgrades in the past, building a new, powerful PC these days is going to run you $1500. Without even picking any top of the line stuff. Guess what didn't get included in there ? GPUs with their bloody ridiculous prices. If you're going with NVidia, this 4000 generation is a waste if you're buying anything but the 4090. You could absolutely buy a 4080 (or rather a 4070Ti), or a 4070, but they're such a horrible deal in terms of price/performance. And that's going to cost you at the absolute least $800 (for a 4070, which is a dogshit card). Or you can try to find a series 3000, but that's also going to run you $1000+. If you're going with AMD, your problems are similar, for cards that are really subpar. As for Intel, well, let's just say an A770 with your high end CPU might cause a few bottlenecks here and there. So, yes, if you're lucky enough to find deals _and_ to have stuff that you can still use from an old, recent rig, sure, building a new PC isn't _that_ expensive. If you have to do major upgrades, you're looking at multiple thousands. Pulling that much money out in one go for something that is ultimately not extremely necessary is something that can only be afforded by a very small percentage of people.
      - Nullabillity 4y ago
        You don't need to upgrade everything at once. Yes, modern high-end GPUs are ridiculously expensive. But my $200-5-years-ago RX480 is also still holding up just fine. It's still more expensive than it ought to be, but I can find it used for around $80 these days. And if you already have an older rig… just bring it over from that.
        ohgodplsno 4y ago
        If you haven't upgraded in a long time, the CPU+MB+RAM combo is a necessary upgrade. You also very likely need to upgrade your PSU, because the 550W of old will not be enough. And you most likely need to upgrade your GPU, unless you want to slap a 10 year old GTX970 to keep playing recent games in 720p with your 24 core CPU. You can bring in hard drives/NVMes, and eventually any additional PCIe cards. So, no, any upgrade not done in the last 5 years means pretty much a full rebuild now. New sockets + DDR5 means that your old build is going to hit a brick wall.
  - ilyt 4y ago
    Assuming you get ~2000 working hours, let's say 10% of that is compiling and you get 3x improvement - you save ~133 hours So you need to be paid ~$30/h to recoup the cost in a year. Of course if you're contractor it means you will... earn less unless you bump the price but that's the "motivation" of being paid by hour...
- pca006132 4y ago
  I have a 20 core CPU (13600), it is already much faster in compiling large programs: it took me ~15mins to build linux kernel. Even if some future CPU can speed up the task by say 3X, I still have to wait for 5mins, and will be distracted. Perhaps the difference would be larger for tasks that are much more time consuming than this, say 3 days vs 1 day.
  - dinvlad 4y ago
    Word is, the current top of the line chips can already compile it in 1 minute (!)
    - tkinom 4y ago
      About right, did it two years ago with 2 Sockets, 128Cores (64 core per socket), 256 Threads 2 Epyc Motherboard with 1TB DDR4. Build Kernel < 90 seconds. Should be faster nowadays....
      - dinvlad 4y ago
        That is the first thing I'm gonna do after finally building it in Feb :-)
RandomTisk 4y ago
Ugly motherboards with 99% of desired featureset: Somewhat almost reasonable prices. Pretty motherboards with 110% of desired featureset: Insert Fresh Kidney and/or Lung
- Semaphor 4y ago
  I feel like nowadays you pay extra for your board not to have Gamer-RGB
  - doikor 4y ago
    It is the same for cases. Often the model with a solid side panel (no window) now costs more.
    - Semaphor 4y ago
      IME it’s more that the ugly ones with a window or mesh go on sale all the time :/
    - helf 4y ago
      That's why I still use a ~15 year old Supermicro server chassis with desktop foot kit on it lol. I've upgraded the innards 2 or 3 times so far. Has 8 hotswap bays, tons of room. no fucking RGB or "windows" or any of that bullshit. I just built an i9-13900K replaced the LGA1366 2P board in it. It's an astounding performance bump, to mildly put it lol. I plan on using this chassis with this setup for probably another 5-10 years before upgrading again.
      - csdvrx 4y ago
        > Has 8 hotswap bays, tons of room refs?
        helf 4y ago
        going forward I will either be using ReFS or ZFS. It will depend on what OS I decide to leave on this new build.
neogodless 4y ago
The AM5 motherboards are currently pricey, but overall if you don't buy bleeding edge, it's not unreasonable (in my opinion). My last build: MSI MAG X570 $200, Ryzen 9 5900X $400, G.Skill 2x16GB DDR4 3600Mhz CL16 $165, Samsung 980 Pro 1TB $150 = $915 That's not a budget build by any means, but it's also not crazy when compared to previous builds in that tier over the past 15 years.
- didgetmaster 4y ago
  The younger generation of programmers seem to think that a $1000 computer is crazy expensive these days. How spoiled we have become! When I built my first computer 30 years ago, the components cost just over $2K (and the components you wished you could afford were closer to $3K) and that is not inflation adjusted. That wasn't the first computer I owned, just the first one I built. I am sure some really old timers remember the ones that cost more that $5K.
  - matwood 4y ago
    Exactly. I see $1k for all that as a steal. I remember spending a lot of money on LVD SCSI in one machine I built to do anything to speed up disk access.
  - sroussey 4y ago
    Wasn’t the original Mac like $2.5k ($7k inflation adjusted)? For the base model.
  - nickjj 4y ago
    I think things could be seen as a little pricey nowadays compared to ~25 years ago, mainly due to video cards. I built about half a dozen machines from parts since 1998 and it was almost a constant to spend $650-800 for a mid-range machine for about 20 of those years. This includes everything but a monitor, but it does include a decent video card. His part list for $915 doesn't include a video card. With today's market a mid-range card will put you at a grand total of about $1,250-1,300. That's approaching 2x the cost of a solid mid-range machine that you could build 8 years ago. Here's a couple of line items from my last part purchase in 2014: - Intel Core i5-4460 LGA 1150 CPU $182 - Crucial MX100 256GB SSD $105 - Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO $35 The crazy thing is, here we are 8+ years later and that same CPU cooler is $45, that's ~23% more expensive than almost a decade ago. The exact CPU and SSD aren't worth price comparing because no one would buy them today since we have way better hardware at similar price points. For ~$180 you can grab a Ryzen 7 5700G and a 1TB SSD is about the same price as 256GB from back then. That feels like it's on a higher end of mid-range for today. It's really video cards where you get killed.
mrtranscendence 4y ago
I feel like CPU prices aren't particularly bad right now. GPUs are awful, though, with prices going up much faster than even our currently high inflation, and price to performance ratios that have barely budged since last generation. I suspect we'll see AIB 4060s for sale at or above the $600 mark. I've seen a bit of apologia for this, claiming that costs have risen so of course prices would increase as well. But prices are going up so much faster than inflation that I'm not sure that passes the sniff test. We should see 4080s for $850-$900, not $1200. All of this just in time for 30-series supplies to dwindle ... new 3080s are back up to the $1k mark. Sigh.
- imbnwa 4y ago
  Wasn't the theory that once 30xx supply cleared out of the warehouses the 40xx series would come down in price?
bastardoperator 4y ago
I've trained myself to look at the cost from a different perspective. If I spend 5K on a monster rig once every 3 years, the cost is around 1600 dollars per year. I'm spending approx 130 dollars a month or 4.35 dollars a day to drive a Rolls Royce. 4.35 a day isn't cheap, but I was spending more than that on starbucks everyday. So I stopped spending 10 dollars a day at Starbucks and opted for the rolls royce. I have a nicer rig, I'm healthier not drinking starbucks, and I'm saving a little money even if we factor in electricity costs.

If it's something you use for work, the time saved could be justified if you have to compile or do something CPU-heavy often

ohgodplsno 4y ago
Unfortunately, it is hard, especially at an individual scale to say "I'm going to save up these $4000 over the next year and a half in productivity". Doubly so if you're just salaried and your pay will come, whether you use the shitty company laptop that takes 15 minutes to build or your crazy home rig. I'd love for me to be able to just run all my builds on full blast on a 24 core beast at home, but if your interests also include games, you're looking at multiple thousands just to upgrade. Needless to say, my apartment, family, vacations and a dozen other things are well above in the priority list.
- wpm 4y ago
  I upgraded to an X670E platform back in October. CPU+Mobo+RAM ran me up to $750 with a bundle from Microcenter (essentially, I got the RAM for free), and I reused my case and power supply. To upgrade to a "24 core beast", as close as you can get with the 7000 series is the 7950X (16C/32T), which I can get on Amazon for $550, minus the aftermarket price for my 7700X (and possibly my old rig, which was a Z170 intel platform). Even if I kept my old processor, a top of the AMD line rig costs about $1250, memory capacity not withstanding. Of course, that says nothing about the additional electricity costs, and I understand that my prices are not obtainable in most of the world unfortunately, but I think $4000 is a stretch unless you needed a load of RAM (it'd be about $600 to max out my motherboard to 128GB).
  - ohgodplsno 4y ago
    Assuming you do not get deals: * $500 for a CPU (7800X starts at $450) * $60 for a cooler because the Wraith Prism is shit. * $200 for a motherboard, maybe $100 if you want to try to cheap out and get something that might have unstable voltages, shit PCIe bandwidth or no NVMe slots, etc. * $200 for 32GB of quality DDR5-4800 (or 5600 if you want to be fancy), and that's easily used up these days. * $200 for a quality 750W power supply * $100 for a case with good enough airflow, assuming you don't already have one. * $200+ for at least 1TB of NVMe storage, easily much more So, assuming a new build that didn't get incremental upgrades in the past, building a new, powerful PC these days is going to run you $1500. Without even picking any top of the line stuff. Guess what didn't get included in there ? GPUs with their bloody ridiculous prices. If you're going with NVidia, this 4000 generation is a waste if you're buying anything but the 4090. You could absolutely buy a 4080 (or rather a 4070Ti), or a 4070, but they're such a horrible deal in terms of price/performance. And that's going to cost you at the absolute least $800 (for a 4070, which is a dogshit card). Or you can try to find a series 3000, but that's also going to run you $1000+. If you're going with AMD, your problems are similar, for cards that are really subpar. As for Intel, well, let's just say an A770 with your high end CPU might cause a few bottlenecks here and there. So, yes, if you're lucky enough to find deals _and_ to have stuff that you can still use from an old, recent rig, sure, building a new PC isn't _that_ expensive. If you have to do major upgrades, you're looking at multiple thousands. Pulling that much money out in one go for something that is ultimately not extremely necessary is something that can only be afforded by a very small percentage of people.
    - Nullabillity 4y ago
      You don't need to upgrade everything at once. Yes, modern high-end GPUs are ridiculously expensive. But my $200-5-years-ago RX480 is also still holding up just fine. It's still more expensive than it ought to be, but I can find it used for around $80 these days. And if you already have an older rig… just bring it over from that.
      - ohgodplsno 4y ago
        If you haven't upgraded in a long time, the CPU+MB+RAM combo is a necessary upgrade. You also very likely need to upgrade your PSU, because the 550W of old will not be enough. And you most likely need to upgrade your GPU, unless you want to slap a 10 year old GTX970 to keep playing recent games in 720p with your 24 core CPU. You can bring in hard drives/NVMes, and eventually any additional PCIe cards. So, no, any upgrade not done in the last 5 years means pretty much a full rebuild now. New sockets + DDR5 means that your old build is going to hit a brick wall.
- ilyt 4y ago
  Assuming you get ~2000 working hours, let's say 10% of that is compiling and you get 3x improvement - you save ~133 hours So you need to be paid ~$30/h to recoup the cost in a year. Of course if you're contractor it means you will... earn less unless you bump the price but that's the "motivation" of being paid by hour...
pca006132 4y ago
I have a 20 core CPU (13600), it is already much faster in compiling large programs: it took me ~15mins to build linux kernel. Even if some future CPU can speed up the task by say 3X, I still have to wait for 5mins, and will be distracted. Perhaps the difference would be larger for tasks that are much more time consuming than this, say 3 days vs 1 day.
- dinvlad 4y ago
  Word is, the current top of the line chips can already compile it in 1 minute (!)
  - tkinom 4y ago
    About right, did it two years ago with 2 Sockets, 128Cores (64 core per socket), 256 Threads 2 Epyc Motherboard with 1TB DDR4. Build Kernel < 90 seconds. Should be faster nowadays....
    - dinvlad 4y ago
      That is the first thing I'm gonna do after finally building it in Feb :-)

RandomTisk 4y ago

Ugly motherboards with 99% of desired featureset: Somewhat almost reasonable prices. Pretty motherboards with 110% of desired featureset: Insert Fresh Kidney and/or Lung

Semaphor 4y ago
I feel like nowadays you pay extra for your board not to have Gamer-RGB
- doikor 4y ago
  It is the same for cases. Often the model with a solid side panel (no window) now costs more.
  - Semaphor 4y ago
    IME it’s more that the ugly ones with a window or mesh go on sale all the time :/
  - helf 4y ago
    That's why I still use a ~15 year old Supermicro server chassis with desktop foot kit on it lol. I've upgraded the innards 2 or 3 times so far. Has 8 hotswap bays, tons of room. no fucking RGB or "windows" or any of that bullshit. I just built an i9-13900K replaced the LGA1366 2P board in it. It's an astounding performance bump, to mildly put it lol. I plan on using this chassis with this setup for probably another 5-10 years before upgrading again.
    - csdvrx 4y ago
      > Has 8 hotswap bays, tons of room refs?
      - helf 4y ago
        going forward I will either be using ReFS or ZFS. It will depend on what OS I decide to leave on this new build.

neogodless 4y ago

The AM5 motherboards are currently pricey, but overall if you don't buy bleeding edge, it's not unreasonable (in my opinion). My last build: MSI MAG X570 $200, Ryzen 9 5900X $400, G.Skill 2x16GB DDR4 3600Mhz CL16 $165, Samsung 980 Pro 1TB $150 = $915 That's not a budget build by any means, but it's also not crazy when compared to previous builds in that tier over the past 15 years.

didgetmaster 4y ago
The younger generation of programmers seem to think that a $1000 computer is crazy expensive these days. How spoiled we have become! When I built my first computer 30 years ago, the components cost just over $2K (and the components you wished you could afford were closer to $3K) and that is not inflation adjusted. That wasn't the first computer I owned, just the first one I built. I am sure some really old timers remember the ones that cost more that $5K.
- matwood 4y ago
  Exactly. I see $1k for all that as a steal. I remember spending a lot of money on LVD SCSI in one machine I built to do anything to speed up disk access.
- sroussey 4y ago
  Wasn’t the original Mac like $2.5k ($7k inflation adjusted)? For the base model.
- nickjj 4y ago
  I think things could be seen as a little pricey nowadays compared to ~25 years ago, mainly due to video cards. I built about half a dozen machines from parts since 1998 and it was almost a constant to spend $650-800 for a mid-range machine for about 20 of those years. This includes everything but a monitor, but it does include a decent video card. His part list for $915 doesn't include a video card. With today's market a mid-range card will put you at a grand total of about $1,250-1,300. That's approaching 2x the cost of a solid mid-range machine that you could build 8 years ago. Here's a couple of line items from my last part purchase in 2014: - Intel Core i5-4460 LGA 1150 CPU $182 - Crucial MX100 256GB SSD $105 - Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO $35 The crazy thing is, here we are 8+ years later and that same CPU cooler is $45, that's ~23% more expensive than almost a decade ago. The exact CPU and SSD aren't worth price comparing because no one would buy them today since we have way better hardware at similar price points. For ~$180 you can grab a Ryzen 7 5700G and a 1TB SSD is about the same price as 256GB from back then. That feels like it's on a higher end of mid-range for today. It's really video cards where you get killed.

mrtranscendence 4y ago

I feel like CPU prices aren't particularly bad right now. GPUs are awful, though, with prices going up much faster than even our currently high inflation, and price to performance ratios that have barely budged since last generation. I suspect we'll see AIB 4060s for sale at or above the $600 mark. I've seen a bit of apologia for this, claiming that costs have risen so of course prices would increase as well. But prices are going up so much faster than inflation that I'm not sure that passes the sniff test. We should see 4080s for $850-$900, not $1200. All of this just in time for 30-series supplies to dwindle ... new 3080s are back up to the $1k mark. Sigh.

imbnwa 4y ago
Wasn't the theory that once 30xx supply cleared out of the warehouses the 40xx series would come down in price?

bastardoperator 4y ago

I've trained myself to look at the cost from a different perspective. If I spend 5K on a monster rig once every 3 years, the cost is around 1600 dollars per year. I'm spending approx 130 dollars a month or 4.35 dollars a day to drive a Rolls Royce. 4.35 a day isn't cheap, but I was spending more than that on starbucks everyday. So I stopped spending 10 dollars a day at Starbucks and opted for the rolls royce. I have a nicer rig, I'm healthier not drinking starbucks, and I'm saving a little money even if we factor in electricity costs.