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Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI
- vittore 6mo agopoor Joe Rogan
- Kirby64 6mo agoNot just motherboards. Cases, PC accessories (fans, etc), consumer SSDs, and more. Cases are especially hard hit, apparently, as they're already quite a low margin business. Personally, I see little reason to upgrade from my AM4 platform. It's never been easier to hold on to aging hardware with the advent of DLSS stretching older cards further, diminishing returns on the newer gen GPUs, and the 'realism' of video games plateauing.
- Liftyee 6mo agoI should have upgraded my GTX 1060 6GB last year. Last year I said I should have upgraded my 1060 last year. I bought it second hand 7 years ago and it is still the same price. I don't do much gaming, and it runs Immich / etc light inference just fine. One thing I don't regret is getting 32GB of DDR4 when I built the system around the time of the GPU upgrade.
- dangus 6mo agoSometimes you just have to accept the current pricing and buy what you need to buy (assuming you need to buy anything at all). 7 years ago it was the same price, but then again, the last 7 years have involved accelerated inflation. So, the same price is actually a lower price. If you're looking for a card in the sane $300 area, the Intel ARC B580 (12GB) or the RX 9060XT (8GB) are a reasonable value. If you want 12GB+ from Nvidia or AMD the used market in previous generations is a good place to look: maybe something like a RTX 3060Ti (12GB) or RX6800XT (16GB). I personally don't think the GPU market is incredibly miserable. Maybe I am just used to the pain or something? Nvidia has a bit of a tax where but something like the RX 9070XT is basically the 3rd fastest gaming GPU money can buy and it's around $700. (I'm not sure why the 5070ti costs $200 more even given Nvidia's software advantages. It performs almost identically it just doesn't make purchase sense)
- saysjonathan 6mo ago3060ti only has 8GB, 3080ti has 12GB. That’ll make a difference for prices/comparison.
- dangus 6mo agoI think I made a mistake there, I meant to recommend the 3060 12GB version. I'm realizing now that the Ti didn't get the 12GB. If you're getting 8GB then I'd say there's not much reason to go back to previous generations.
- misnome 6mo agoI’m in almost exactly the same boat. 2017 GTX 1070 and 32GB ram. I don’t run games 4K and still haven’t had any problems running reasonably pretty recent stuff.
- Simulacra 6mo agoAgreed. I build a system every ten years and I've got 6 years to go. AM4 works great, and I've managed to hoard enough ram and drives to hopefully cover any concerns for the next 4 years. Things work, they are stable, and I feel super lucky for that.
- Helmut10001 6mo agoI invested quite a bit in enterprises level homelab equipment 2020 to 2025 (about 10k). Happy I made it before the big bang. Eg. my SAS he8 drives will last at least till 2035. But what then? I want my children to be free, too.
- groby_b 6mo agoYou cannot be fully free if you're attached to physical goods. It may sound like pseudo-Buddhist claptrap, but it's also true. Or, I suppose, Fight Club claptrap. It's still true. The choice is "do you want to participate in society, its benefits and drawbacks". You can't have only one side of that.
- lioeters 6mo agoThe first rule of Buddhist Fight Club is that attachment causes suffering.
- danparsonson 6mo agoYou're not supposed to talk about it!
- andrekandre 6mo ago> attachment causes suffering it also makes the economy go round (unfortunately)
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- PowerElectronix 6mo agoWhen investors stop to ponder if they are ever going to see any return on their superhot AI investments, you'll have all the cheap hardware you could ever want.
- jolmg 6mo ago> and the 'realism' of video games plateauing. I used to think the plateau was here when the Xbox 360 and PS3 came out.
- bigstrat2003 6mo agoI still think it pretty much was the last major generational upgrade in graphics. An early PS3 game looked night and day better than a late PS2 game. Meanwhile, an early PS4 game looked only marginally better than a late PS3 game, and most PS5 games don't look noticeably better than a PS4 game. I don't mind that graphics have plateaued, because they aren't the important bit. If anything, I would rather that devs stop trying to chase graphics and make more games with shorter dev cycles.
- Kirby64 6mo ago> Meanwhile, an early PS4 game looked only marginally better than a late PS3 game, and most PS5 games don't look noticeably better than a PS4 game. Partially this is because there was usually an overlap in sales for early PS4 and late PS3, etc. if you have to support both console generations, it won’t truly be able to take advantage of the newer gen stuff.
- Tanoc 6mo agoTexture resolution and shadow resolution do a lot to make a game look better. The big difference between the PlayStation 2 and 3 was the massive jump in texture resolution, shadow resolution and model polygon count. Play Gran Turismo 5 and go look at one of the cars imported from Gran Turismo 4 for a good example. However the PlayStation 2 was capable of some very high polygon count models, as evidenced by Lulu's cutscene model from Final Fantasy X that rivals most PlayStation 3 player models in detail. Those resolution upgrades, the number of objects and not just polygons displayable on screen, and the increase in distance required for low-poly LOD models all made that giant leap possible and very visible. Since then it's mostly been adding camera effects such as depth of field and ambient occlusion that are much less noticeable. Though for those with keen eyes, only in the current generation are there textures without noticeable anti-aliasing effects which came as a result of being able to split the UVs thanks to a higher resolution making small UV faces possible.
- MegaDeKay 6mo agoWhat's wild is with all this craziness going on, it is sounding like AMD is bringing back the 5800X3D for another kick at the can. AM4 has got to be one of the greatest platforms to ever exist.
- xbmcuser 6mo ago10-12 Months ago I had commented here that people are not realising that AI is going to price us normal people out of computer hardware and we need China to actually reach on parity with node size. And sadly it looks like I was correct in my prediction.
- tetris11 6mo agoIt's an active attack on the Hobbyist space. Qualcomm buying Arduino solidified this idea in my head. They literally want us to own nothing.
- jmclnx 6mo agoTin foil hat :) But in a way I do agree with you, I doubt it is as organized as you imply. Yes, companies and governments do not way anyone on a General Computing Device at all. They want to see exactly what content you are viewing and responding to. Microsoft and Apple have been slowly adding various forms of spyware and locking down what applications you can use. And Cell Phones ? Those are the Holy Grail of what Microsoft and Apple want to move your Laptop/PC to. Right now Linux and BSD are the only games in town for non-spyware systems. But the new Age Verification Laws seems to be a first attempt to lock-down even Linux :( Since the Linux Foundation is owned by large corporations, I feel that will succeed. For the BSDs ? Right now seems they are flying under the radar.
- ButyTh0 6mo agoWhy do you doubt this when the rich also have Signal? They meet and talk out of view? The insider trading coming out of Washington? Why when emails from discovery in labor disputes between google and apple in the 2010s revealed they engage in exactly the sort of manipulation you disbelieve?
- ButyTh0 6mo agoBecause they own nothing but make believe stocks and life works great for them. The mega-rich are 100% decoupled from physical reality. May as well treat them more like tribal shaman, priests, preachers, and rabbis. Just parroting memes the likewise idiot politicians believe are the magic chants that keep gravity itself pulling together the Earth. "Omg he said the thing! Cut his taxes! Give him welfare!" Our generation of leaders were raised in a pre-science and information as world. They rely entirely in cult of personality as their meat suit never sees itself engage in the labor it relies on to live. It's well aware intuitively how fucked it is. Must continue to stand in the pulpit!
- lowbloodsugar 6mo agoShortage of ram and ssds, and soon, cpus. Motherboards aren’t selling because theres no point buying a motherboard if you can’t by the ram or ssd it needs. It’s brutal. I’ve just built a workstation with DDR4 and two-gen old cpu. I paid more for the ddr4 than it originally cost, four years ago. The same amount of ram for the latest motherboard would have been 10x ($10,000). So used DDR4 has gone through the roof, which impacts hobbyists who used to rely on “hand-me-downs”.
- GoofGarage 6mo ago15 months ago I saw writing on the wall on several fronts. I suggested my community commit to their buys/builds ASAP and be forward-looking, before things changed. My high-end HEDT would now be +$2300 to build mostly due to memory and SSD pricing. 96GB of memory going from $430 -> $1800 is wild. One community member literally wouldn’t be able to buy their Mac Mini configuration anymore, plus the self-upgrade SSD would be price hiked. Where I blanche most is my storage server running TrueNAS. Built it 3.5 years ago, future-proofing in mind. Strong SSD cache layer, plus two spare HDDs as spares. It wasn’t cheap then, but I think between disks, storage, ECC memory, etc. it’s +$7000 now to rebuild it again, +$9000-$10000 on last generation hardware.
- int32_64 6mo agoThe brief window between the covid gaming bubble pop/PoS ETH switch and the AI hardware blackhole will be fondly remembered as the last golden age of consumer PC hardware accessibility.
- bobomonkey 6mo agoIf China keeps releasing decent copies of SOTA models that only take 20% of the resources, then we may get some relief when those models become "good-enough"
- matthewaveryusa 6mo agoI've been using deepseek and it's good enough for my personal use. It takes way more time/tokens/course-correcting to get things done, but I spend in a month what I spend in a day with opus 4.6
- gruez 6mo ago>copies of SOTA models that only take 20% of the resources They might be 20% of the price (because they don't have to invest that much in training), but are probably not 20% of the resources (ie. inference), considering they take more tokens to do the same task, and have slower inference speeds. https://x.com/scaling01/status/2050616057191072161 https://x.com/scaling01/status/2050616057191072161
- GrinningFool 6mo agoEven at 2x the tokens (max from that tweet), that makes them 40% of resources. Which is still only 40% of the resources.
- xg15 6mo agoWaiting for the future where the only computing devices you can buy as a consumer are locked-down phones and PCs are simply not available anymore...
- lifestyleguru 6mo agoThis looks like a consumer choice and producers are following up with the demand.
- wtetzner 6mo agoGiven that the AI companies are still operating at a loss and running on investor money, I'm not sure it's actually driven by consumer choice.
- lifestyleguru 6mo agoConsumers are not helping though. They do everything on a smartphone and don't even blink when mobile app is required for most trivial things.
- buellerbueller 6mo agoTo echo the post you are responding to: when the app is required it isn't really a consumer choice, is it?
- lifestyleguru 6mo ago> required it isn't really a consumer choice, is it? No one really resists or pushes back. When I resist I hear "that's what consumers want", "it's for security", or that I'm the problem. There is no one to complain to even, except to low paid kiddos in customer service.
- buellerbueller 6mo ago
- cap11235 6mo ago[flagged]
- SirFatty 6mo agoI can't speak to it now, but it used to be the go to source of CPU and 3D card benchmarking.
- leecommamichael 6mo agoThey've turned into a pretty unserious, non-critical, non-hardcore ad page.
- buellerbueller 6mo agoSo, they're like an LLM?
- unethical_ban 6mo agoIt's still my go-to. Their GPU benchmark pages are useful.
- Giorgi 6mo agoAs an example?
- TheRealPomax 6mo ago"Fueled by greed". It would be trivial to say no to AI companies because dollars are dollars, it doesn't matter who pays them, and prioritizing literally all of humanity instead of "five companies" is a choice that every single supplier could make, but decided not to. This problem was 100% manufactured by suppliers.
- groby_b 6mo agoIt would be equally "trivial" to say no to personal compute as well. So maybe the problem is manufactured by all of us.
- TheRealPomax 6mo agoA dollar is a dollar, and suppliers chose to screw over the world for not-even-profits: they would have sold the exact same number of chips if they changed how they prioritized delivery while making sure everyone got chips instead of just a handful of industries. So, no: it's nothing like what you replied with and that was a rather dumb thing to say.
- iFred 6mo agoHigh end resins and epoxies are in a critical supply shortage right now. I suspect that there are going to be some serious resource driven PCB shortages in the very near future.
- PunchyHamster 6mo ago...no. If anything the GPU situation would cause it to ease up as less low-middle end gets even build
- tayo42 6mo agoIs anything not in a shortage?
- qiine 6mo agobad news
- sockbot 6mo agoLabor
- lukhas 6mo ago[flagged]
- marcosdumay 6mo agoThe supply-chain disruptions didn't get there yet, but you just wait...
- PowerElectronix 6mo agoNo more tech as all tech components are in short supply, so it'll just become old fashioned fascism.
- yndoendo 6mo agoAuthoritarianism
- palmotea 6mo agoMaybe with AI we can finally kill user-owned computing, and make almost everyone renters. It's really wrong that the common people have access to things like PCs. It leaves a lot of money on the table the corporations can extract, and makes control much harder. PCs should cost at least as much as a car, so only the right people can afford them. Own nothing and be happy.
- martinwilly34 6mo ago[dead]
- 2ndorderthought 6mo ago[flagged]
- wg0 6mo agoAI bros and crypto bros. One and the same thing. Same optimism. Same arguments. Same blind faith. Same zero knowledge of how economy, society or even the technology they are evangelizing works under the hood and what are its shortcomings that are impossible to overcome because physics won't allow.
- red75prime 6mo ago> what are its shortcomings that are impossible to overcome because physics won't allow. Have you intended to say "because reasons"? There should be a long chain of reasoning connecting "LLMs will never be able to strictly follow instructions written in natural language (as agreed by 90% consensus of experts or some such, because you can't formally verify adherence to informal natural language instructions)" and "physics doesn't allow that." And I can't find it anywhere. Neither in your comment history, nor in literature.
- wg0 6mo agoBecause it is next token predictions and there is no logical part into that. It is like saying I cannot find any research paper on the fact that car collusion might cause fire because gasoline is in the tank. But the fact is that there's plenty of literature out there on hallucination and unreliability of LLMs already. If you know otherwise, let us inform Dario before next funding round.
- hackernudes 6mo agoWill demand for computing ever go down from where it is now? Even if the AI bubble temporarily pops, in the long run I think the demand for computers will be practically infinite. Market forces will probably bring the price of hardware down in the next decade. Whether it is in a form that is useful for regular people/hobbyists is another question. If not, then hopefully the "cloud" starts to look a lot different.
- hx8 6mo agoI think it's possible (10-15%) that the AI bubble pops and we all live without 50M token/day OpenClaw installs and running Opus to do things that should have been done by a shell script to the point that it causes a dip in total compute demand. I think it's likely (75% likely if the AI bubble pop causes a dip in compute demand) that this dip extends longer than the median lifespan of the hardware currently being installed in datacenter. Of course in 20 years we'll be using more compute than today (99% likely). EDIT: Of course cryptocurrencies provide a floor compute pricing.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 6mo agoWe are in AI mania right now. I dont think this will continue forever.
- serf 6mo agohard to tell. even if volume and hype decreases from the general pop there doesn't seem to be much of a cap on model requirements -- so at least one sector will be pushed into purchases one way or another.
- layer8 6mo agoSmaller manufacturers will fold, and larger ones will leave the consumer market (like Micron/Crucial did), before the market has a chance to bounce back. If and when it does recover, it will be a market of much fewer choices.
- MSFT_Edging 6mo agoA somewhat comparable historical example is the destruction of the Swiss watch industry in the 70s with the advent of quartz and digital watches. A Rolex Daytona today is known as a very fancy and even hard-to-get watch. In the 70s they were practically giving them away with other watch purchases because electronic watches were taking their lunch. The bigger takeaway, I think, is the destruction and folding eventually lead to the Swatch group. People forget Rolex, Omega, et. al. were tool watches that were expensive but fairly attainable. Even into the 90s you could walk into a Rolex store and walk out with the watch you wanted. Nowadays you basically have to buy a watch to prove you're good enough to get the one you want. I forsee a similar thing happening with computing hardware. There will be a small high-end side industry for non-datacenter customers. The digital watch user will be renting time for a thin client via a datacenter provider. The wealthy or high status user will be able to purchase the expensive boutique home computing hardware they want.
- hnav 6mo agoBesides watches becoming expensive trinkets, a Rolex Daytona in the 70s was basically the same watch as what you could get from other manufacturers with the same movement inside. Today you have to spend at least 30k to get something comparable to it which is part of the reason that it's in a permanent demand crunch.
- overgard 6mo agoI know it's going to be extremely painful, but the sooner this ridiculous unsustainable AI bubble pops the better off we'll be. The more it inflates the more collateral damage it will cause, and we're probably already looking at 2008 levels of financial chaos.
- jeremyjh 6mo agoWhat’s the feedback loop that leads to a total financial collapse? This looks much more like dotcom bubble. Everyone knows where the exposure is.
- overgard 6mo agoI think it comes down to scale (there's like 2 trillion invested so far by very large institutions) and also AI hollowing out foolish companies that decided to go "AI native" and downsize and lose institutional knowledge. When the rug pull inevitably comes and the AI subsidies are gone, the entire idea of "efficiency gains" in a lot of places is going to look pretty bad as soon as they look at their bill.
- andrekandre 6mo agoif that happens, its going to be one hell of a mess of dominoes to clean up...
- rkozik1989 6mo agoThere are probably multiple goals of AI investment. It's entirely possible that they are deliberately killing the affordability of how personal electronics like home computers are made and will instead replace them with terminals that stream everything to the cloud. You can make a lot more money off consumers if you can turn their entire computing experience into a utility.
- andrekandre 6mo ago> replace them with terminals that stream everything to the cloud they've been trying for a looong time on that one. i still remember those junky "net appliance"s from the early 2000s [0] and oracle and sun making big statements about them... [0] https://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/sonys-evilla-joins-audrey-in-net-appliance-graveyard-13289.html https://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/sonys-evilla-joins-audr...
- dghughes 6mo agoI guess my hasty purchase meant as only a temporary, times were tight, placeholder Dell Inspiron in 2015 has to do me for another ten years.
- hnav 6mo agohope you're handy with a soldering iron (reflow station?) because eventually the passive components are going to start failing and I don't imagine you'll be able to plug off the shelf components into a Dell
- jefurii 6mo agoSee Permacomputing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48044638 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48044638
- CrimsonCape 6mo agoI assume manufacturers were making enough motherboards in 2025 to fulfill demand, so what happens when the demand is the same but the production is 25% less? Crazy.
- himata4113 6mo agoI was looking into self-hosting deekseek v4 pro since frankly cache reads are an absolute scam and they're 90% of the cost, but then I looked at the ROI and it will never pay off fast enough because the hardware will become obsolete faster even if you were running 10 token generation streams 24/7. The napkin math resulted that renting is around 27 times cheaper than owning (not including power). I think we're really screwed when it comes to having owned access to AI unless intel comes out swinging with a c series card that has 128gb vram so we can run them in a 4x128gb configuration, but seems unlikely since nvidia has a large share in them. This was calculated expecting around 30tok/s, of course you can get 2-5tok/s much much cheaper, but it's unusable for my workflow.
- kingstnap 6mo agoIronically the few people not scamming you for cache reads are Deepseek. Everyone else charges a ridiculous amount but Deepseeks API is $0.003625 / M tok. I'm surprised no one talks about this because of how significant it is. GPT 5.5 for example costs a ridiculous $0.50 / M tok cached. It's literally almost 140 times cheaper which matters a lot for tool calls.
- himata4113 6mo agoit's a temporary promo, deepseek will return to only 10x cheaper after.
- kingstnap 6mo agoYes Deepseek V4 pro is currently on discount. > The deepseek-v4-pro model is currently offered at a 75% discount, extended until 2026/05/31 15:59 UTC. However even when the discount ends its still very cheap. It will go back to $0.0145 / M cache hit. That's still 34x cheaper than GPT 5.5.
- himata4113 6mo agodoesn't matter when subscriptions get cache reads for free, it is only really worth it if it's x340 cheaper otherwise I'd be paying $120 a day, 90% of the cost being cache reads for any top level opensource model.
- hx8 6mo agoPC is the last major open platform. While other platforms like Android and becoming less open, PC in general is becoming more open than it's been in a long time as heavy MacOS/Android/iOS competition is creating a focus on open standards and all-time high strong Linux support gives people a place to land and tinker/hack to their heart's content. I think we will see an abandonment of consumer grade PC components and individuals are either pushed towards closed hardware like Playstation, MacBooks, and Android devices or they are pushed towards server grade components. I already have home sever rack, and would recommend it for other people.
- altcognito 6mo ago> While other platforms like Android and becoming less open ok.... > PC in general is becoming more open than it's been in a long time as heavy MacOS/Android/iOS competition is creating a focus on open standards ... I'm so confused by what you're trying to say here.
- fatal94 6mo agoThis will surely bring new energy into opening these platforms, as it did in days before
- kkfx 6mo ago...just as the kleptocrats wanted, to stop the spread of self-hosting and desktop computing now that society is tentatively starting to go digital.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6mo agoI'm sure the AI shortages are hurting, but also I'm still using my same motherboard from 2020 and I see no reason why I should have to upgrade in the next 2-3 years (whenever I buy my RTX 7070Ti, it might be time, but maybe not even then).
- oybng 6mo agoIt's not just new hardware, even used hard drives manufactured a decade ago have at least doubled in price. Scam Altman has effectively killed personal computing for all but the most affluent
- rf15 6mo agoconsidering how unsustainable this whole AI Business is and how much it ruins everything, I can't wait for the crash. Why did we listen to the Worldcoin guy again?
- downrightmike 6mo agoBecause he killed the Open part of openai and the PEs went nuts
- wao0uuno 6mo agoI can't wait for this to happen. I live far enough from the US to not be super affected by this crash and hopefully I will be able to stock up on disks and parts once the prices drop.
- LeoPanthera 6mo agoNo point in buying motherboards if you can't afford to put any RAM in it.
- post_break 6mo agoMotherboards used to be $100, $200 for the high end. Now they want $300+, ram is crazy, storage, video cards, etc. I'm not surprised sales for these components is hitting a wall.
- dangus 6mo agoI don't really agree with this. Motherboard prices haven't been moved at all by AI. I would also say that most consumers, who are almost exclusively buying gaming-oriented boards, do not need anything high end. They can pretty much buy the cheapest board available. I am shopping around for a mini ITX board and the difference between something at $180 and something at $400 is basically one to two faster USB ports, which are pretty much irrelevant on desktop computers, and a few minor conveniences that I imagine most people can do without. The higher-end chipsets add no discernible advantage and there are no CPUs that are unsupported by the lower end chipsets (on the AMD side, at least). The high end stuff is just available for people with a lot of money.
- amluto 6mo agoI am massively sick of gaming focused boards. I don’t want my board to be “tough” or “mil-spec” or be extra shiny or have fancy-proprietary-auto-overclock. I want a reliable board that complies with all the specs it claims to support. Low idle power consumption would be nice, too. This is obnoxiously difficult to shop for in the desktop/workstation space.
- greycol 6mo agoThe PCIe lanes are the worst. You have x16 slots that run x1, you need to check slots with m.2 to make sure an x8 doesn't become x4 if you insert storage. Wait if I plug something into the thunderbolt port my 10g network card runs at half speed? Obviously these are actual physical limitation from PCIe lane counts, but it makes it impossible to search. Just painfull.
- chainingsolid 6mo ago
- voxleone 6mo agoWeren't we supposed to be living in the post-scarcity era?
- fanatic2pope 6mo agoWe are, it's just very unevenly distributed.
- TheGRS 6mo agoI'm thinking about how I jumped on getting a new PC a little over a year ago anticipating tariffs would balloon prices. Turns out I made the right choice but for the wrong reasons (not like the tariffs are helping either, but just wasn't as big of a factor).
- dabinat 6mo agoThis is really a two-for-one for the AI companies: they lock up the hardware market for their growth while also making sure no-one can buy hardware to host models locally.
- romaniv 6mo agoPCs and higher-end IoT devices (like RPi) are becoming less and less affordable. The web is saturated with slop and bot traffic. I wonder how many people think about what this means. We are rapidly losing several of our major technological ecosystems that have driven economic growth in the past few decades. It's not at all clear what economic benefits we will be getting in return.
- wao0uuno 6mo agoI think people are slowly realizing this and that's why projects like Meshtastic are so popular. Too bad none of that crap actually works at scale.
- naoru 6mo agoShortages or not, there's little demand for cool new motherboards and CPUs from the enthusiast corner of the market because hardware platforms themselves are stagnating performance-wise. 13-14gen Intel Cores are still more than enough for your average home gamer, Zen 5 shows only marginal improvement over Zen 4 except for a very narrow range of workloads, getting wider than 128bit memory bus is prohibitively expensive while relatively cheap consumer boxes like Mac Mini run circles around dual-channel DDR5 setups, so on, so forth. Sure, presenting this as a consequence of AI boom is convenient for a news outlet, but even before the craze both Intel and AMD were dragging their feet. I'm not buying it. Both the premise and the new motherboard, that is.
- kev009 6mo agoI wanted to build a Threadripper 9965WX and the math worked out until DDR5 prices come in to play. Instead I got a used Lenovo P620 5975WX and still had to buy DDR4 from Shenzhen to get anything remotely affordable. The IPC of the Zen5 is a meaningful uplift especially for single thread but it is out of reach.
- jononor 6mo agoWhere/how did you buy your DDR4 from SZ? Interested in doing the same, but want reputable source/supplier.
- kev009 6mo agoThe seller was Focus Memory on Newegg, DIMMs are Rimlance. It arrived quickly via DHL. I'd be a little sketched out to do this if it wasn't registered ECC. The dies appear to be Micron, register IDT, but there is some possibility of soft fraud where they die printed over something. The registers look a little scratched so I wonder if they found some way of recycling DIMMs or even dies. The SPD is their own. # dmidecode 3.7 # SMBIOS entry point at 0xba970000 Found SMBIOS entry point in EFI, reading table from /dev/mem. SMBIOS 3.3.0 present. Handle 0x0023, DMI type 16, 23 bytes Physical Memory Array Location: System Board Or Motherboard Use: System Memory Error Correction Type: Multi-bit ECC Maximum Capacity: 1 TiB Error Information Handle: 0x0022 Number Of Devices: 8 Handle 0x0027, DMI type 17, 92 bytes Memory Device Array Handle: 0x0023 Error Information Handle: 0x0026 Total Width: 72 bits Data Width: 64 bits Size: 32 GiB Form Factor: DIMM Set: None Locator: DIMM5 Bank Locator: BANK4 Type: DDR4 Type Detail: Synchronous Registered (Buffered) Speed: 3200 MT/s Manufacturer: Unknown Serial Number: 05A23401 Asset Tag: Not Specified Part Number: RRD25600D4C8K256 Rank: 2 Configured Memory Speed: 3200 MT/s Minimum Voltage: 1.2 V Maximum Voltage: 1.2 V Configured Voltage: 1.2 V Memory Technology: DRAM Memory Operating Mode Capability: Volatile memory Firmware Version: Unknown Module Manufacturer ID: Bank 1, Hex 0x80 Module Product ID: Unknown Memory Subsystem Controller Manufacturer ID: Unknown Memory Subsystem Controller Product ID: Unknown Non-Volatile Size: None Volatile Size: 32 GiB Cache Size: None Logical Size: None ...
- arian_ 6mo agoAI is simultaneously the reason you can't buy a motherboard and the reason you don't need to build a PC anymore. The industry is eating itself from both ends.
- PowerElectronix 6mo agoWhy don't I need to build a PC? I wanna run some stuff in it.
- estimator7292 6mo ago[flagged]
- wao0uuno 6mo agoAI is exactly the reason why I would like to build a high end PC. I'm interested in this technology but I don't want to have anything to do with AI subscriptions and big tech in general.
- eklavya 6mo agoI would say that since more and more of the world wants/needs sovereignty in this space, more and more options would come up in the next 5 years. They will probably not be the cutting edge we have now but personal computing will not die. It will just get a (healthy) reset.
- xnx 6mo agoWho will be the first motherboard maker to put out a board with 12 slots for legacy RAM?
- fredoralive 6mo agoASrock have created a "HUDIMM", which is basically a half bandwidth DDR5 DIMM. Basically half the number of chips per DIMM. So kinda a modern day 386SX with its 16 bit bus. Presumably hoping you'll be able get fewer, higher capacity DRAM dice for a competitive price versus a normal DIMM. On modern systems (all 64 bit AMD, and Intel Core "i" onwards, so quite old now) the memory controller is integrated into the CPU, so what the CPU supports is what you get, and the latest CPUs are DDR5 only. Intel did have a transitional phase of CPUs that can do both DDR4 or 5 depending on motherboard, but AMD it's AM4 = DDR4, AM5 = DDR5.
- foobar1274278 6mo agoReminds me of how ever since egg prices went to the moon we've all had to give up dessert and subsist on thin gruel for breakfast. What's that? Egg prices are back down after suppliers cranked up their output? Surely nothing like that is possible with hardware... Personal computing is dead forever...
- ls612 6mo agoThis will happen eventually but there is a much longer lag for hardware supply than for egg supply so I wouldn’t expect a ton of improvement until late 2027 or even 2028.
- CamperBob2 6mo agoIt takes 5 months for a newly-hatched chicken to start laying eggs. It takes 5 years after breaking ground on a new fab to start producing chips.
- lowbloodsugar 6mo agoThat’s the issue: ram suppliers have not started building new fabs, which means they expect this demand to be temporary and they’re just going to make a killing on it while they can. It takes years to get a fab up, and they think demand will be gone by then. So that means ridiculous prices now, and if demand doesn’t drop, ridiculous prices until someone thinks the demand will continue for four more years after that moment. Whatever the moment, building for four years out is a risk. So this could last forever.
- dist-epoch 6mo ago> SK Hynix to invest about $13 bln in a new South Korea plant to meet AI memory demand https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/sk-hynix-invest-about-13-bln-new-south-korea-plant-meet-ai-memory-demand-2026-04-22/ https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/sk-hynix-invest-a... > SK Hynix has reportedly broken ground on a new advanced memory packaging facility in West Lafayette, Indiana, that should boost the supply of US-made high-bandwidth memory (HBM) https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2026/04/22/sk-hynix-breaks-ground-on-indiana-advanced-packaging-plant/5227437 https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2026/04/22/sk-hynix-brea... > Samsung to advance mega-fab expansion by 6 months to get ahead in capacity race; SK Hynix follows suit https://www.kedglobal.com/korean-chipmakers/newsView/ked202605070006 https://www.kedglobal.com/korean-chipmakers/newsView/ked2026...
- eaf7e281 6mo agoIs now a good time to get a upgrade for cpu and motherboard?
- quantified 6mo agoWhen photosynthesis first appeared, the oxygen it produced poisoned the existing life. Sulfur-breathers basically disappeared. In the geologic record the oxygen shows up as massive layers of iron oxide which we mine and turn into steel now. New things can radically shake up the existing environment, the degree of shakeup is the measure of how radical it is.
- gosub100 6mo agoLet's shake up AI by taxing it's profits to ensure nobody in our country goes homeless.
- ahoy 6mo agoGreat analogy! Unfortunately we are the sulfur breathers.
- Waterluvian 6mo agoIt’s the ultimate NIMBYism. The idea is fine but nobody actually wants it when they’re the sulphur breather. If you really want to see a radical shakeup that would have some very exciting effects, could I interest you in a little Total Atomic Anihilation?
- LoganDark 6mo agoIt looks like we are going to start to see consumer components stop being created in the first place, as demand dries up to the point where it's no longer worth it to serve the consumer market at all. Almost purely because the supply is already so low that almost no one is willing to pay the price.
- deathanatos 6mo agoI'm one of the collapsed sales. My desktop had died, and I had been thinking about rebuilding it. But RAM prices went to the moon, so I instead opted to repair the desktop. (It's only ~15 years old.) It's alive, again, and performs well enough. The HDD in it is pretty old (not as old as the rest of it, it's on its second drive; 15 years would be quite impressive!), and still works for now, but there too, prices are silly and well above inflation. (I looked it up again: the same HDD is 50% more expensive today than when I bought it, in real, accounting-for-inflation dollars.)
- WarOnPrivacy 6mo agoI've been replacing older systems with last gen hardware off ebay. I'm typing this on a Thinkpad T14 i5-1250p 512GB 32GB WWAN I picked up last week for $370 all in. Since this mess started, I've bought dozens of unused and like-new systems for clients. All with modern hardware - in the $250-$600 range.
- ryandrake 6mo agoCraigslist still exists, too. Found a really nice ~10 year old HP workstation for $100 and crammed as much DDR3 ECC RAM (still cheap) and the bets Ivy Bridge CPUs (cheap) I could find into it, and it shreds.
- beloch 6mo ago"Despite this drop in sales, these companies aren’t exactly struggling. Asus, Gigabyte, and ASRock have pivoted some of their production towards AI servers, allowing them to capture some of the investments that hyperscalers are generously pouring into their data centers. But if you’re planning to build a completely new PC from scratch, you might be able to find good deals on motherboard combos, especially as retailers are keen on getting their inventories moving. " ---------------- 1. Within a few months, these manufacturers will likely raise desktop mobo and CPU prices with the justification that "volumes are too low". 2. If you're upgrading from an older machine, it likely has a format of RAM that's not compatible with newer boards. Upgrading the cheap parts now and waiting for the expensive bits to come down is simply not an option. It's all or nothing. Game and application developers should be paying close attention to this. You're used to the average user's system spec going up every year. That's stopped for now. The average memory in new systems may actually retreat!
- tgtweak 6mo agoWhen RAM and an SSD cost more than an entire system used to it's not surprising to see this.
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- dabedee 6mo agoProgress, in any meaningful sense, has to mean we are more capable of sustaining ourselves than we were before. Burning down the commons to train and serve a mythomaniac chatbot is not that. The consumer markets that still worked will shrink, and some will die.
- magicalhippo 6mo agoI think the shocking part is it's only projected to go down with 25%. That's quite mild given the increase in memory, storage and GPU prices, in my view.
- jedberg 6mo agoThis makes me sad. My son was just about to be old enough to build his first PC, and was showing interest. I guess I'm going to have match his savings 1:1 to make it possible now.
- cullenking 6mo agoAnecdata to add to the pile...I pulled three 1u epyc gen2 servers from my production rack 1.5 years ago and replaced them with lower power alternatives for a production storage cluster. I didn't need the extra CPUs for app server stuff so they sat in my house for a while. Fast forward 1.5 years and it was making sense to upgrade some app servers to new gen stuff, get a bump in frequency and core count...when i went to spec some new servers, my normal $15k - $20k build was $55k. Instead, I hittup ebay, got six used gen3 processors, found a "good deal" on a couple tb of new ram (still insanely expensive), and came out with the same overall horsepower for a total of $20k instead of $110k. I know this is about consumer desktop, but seeing the comments about upgrading old hardware caused me to chime in. This is happening in the production/enterprise level in some segments.
- maplethorpe 6mo agoThey should try releasing one with a futuristic space-age design and flashing rainbow lights. Maybe give it a name like HARDTEK and put some random techy shapes all over it.
- soupspaces 6mo ago"fueled by AI"
- rahadbhuiya 6mo ago[dead]