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My own PC died and now I’m locked out of my entire Steam library for the foreseeable future. A $2000 PC is literally a downgrade from what I bought 10 freaking

My own PC died and now I’m locked out of my entire Steam library for the foreseeable future. A $2000 PC is literally a downgrade from what I bought 10 freaking years ago. What the freaking hell.

stephenitis 2mo ago
What part of your PC died?
- throwatdem12311 2mo ago
  Motherboard. New motherboard…so new cpu socket (mine was Broadwell)…and new ram needed. GPU is mostly fine and can probably reuse that but it’s Vega so not the greatest I was due for an upgrade but the prices of everything is ridiculous. The thought of pc-of-Theseus’ing my busted ass PC is just sad. Thank god I bought a PS5 Pro before Sony started jacking up the prices. I remember when buying a $300 GPU was extravagant and gave you state of the art graphics.
  - ed_mercer 2mo ago
    can't you just buy a used same class motherboard from a marketplace?
  - pdimitar 2mo ago
    Why don't you just get a MB only for now? What mandates an entire new batch of hardware?
    - throwatdem12311 2mo ago
      I’ve been pricing out my various options but the notion of replacing a 10 year old motherboard with another 10 year old motherboard is kinda lousy. The PC I replaced when I bought this one was such a huge improvement. My options basically boils down to fixing trash that’s falling apart or a sidegrade at best for the same price as what I bought a beast of a PC for 10 freaking years ago. Depressing.
      - pdimitar 2mo ago
        Oh I agree, I am just saying that if you really did not want to spend, there are obviously options. I am thinking of promoting my super old and long-time-not-used PC with an i7-3770 and 32GB DDR3 RAM to a server and I bought a ~$45 motherboard for it some months ago, now I have to bother finding it a good NAS case and buy at least two HDDs (the real cost here). Point is, quite a lot of hardware can still do a lot. I have a Ryzen 5500U-based laptop that still outperforms the PCs of most people that I know (non-tech people). Though in my case I feel like I have to get a loan to buy a workstation + an actual gaming PC for my wife. That all is beginning to look like at least $15k... yikes. But I am not sure I can wait until 2028 to see if things _start_ normalizing... Depressing indeed.
        alasano 2mo ago
        My Truenas setup runs on a i7-3770 with 16GB DDR3, still good tbh. Have a whole bunch of self hosted apps running on it exposed through tailscale.
      - starkrights 2mo ago
        10 year old is still DDR4, and ddr4 is still plenty fine for gaming workloads. AM4 still has some solid options out there, the 5800x3d has 3d vcache and would be an insane upgrade over any… quad core? 6th gen intel? Not sure what the AMD at the time was. 14th gen intel supports both ddr4/5 if you wanted the ram upgrade potential, but it… well, I remember it being pretty sketchy perf/degradation wise for a while, so maybe don’t go with them. I understand the sucky feeling that you’re sidegrading instead of investing in a new beastly rig for a reasonable price- believe me I’ve been in the same boat since all this GPU bullshit started. I got lucky choosing to upgrade to ddr5 years ago, but I elected not to get a GPU out of a lack of clairvoyance :(. Still though- I upgraded from an i7 6700k in 2023. The 5800x3d released a year prior to the CPU I picked up. Granted I went to zen 5, but holy shit I didn’t not realize how fucking old that 6700k was haha. The 3dvcache on AMD CPUs is a crazy, crazy boost- in addition to the fact that modern CPUs are already bounds and leagues ahead of 2016, and I would go to bet that even if it’s technically a sidegrade, you probably wouldn’t feel too horrible about the money spent. (I really want to say that you’d feel pretty satisfied with it it, but I can’t discount that I also jumped up to a higher tier zen 5 cpu, and don’t have explicit experience with the 5800x or other AM4 stuff. ymmv!)
    - milch 2mo ago
      I've been in the same boat since it seems something about the memory controller on my gaming PC's MB is broken, but price wise it feels like it just doesn't make sense. I could get something from eBay relatively cheap but then I'd probably spend an hour disassembling and reassembling just to maybe learn that the eBay unit has some equivalent issue or is slightly broken in some other way. I could old new stock for outrageous prices. Right now I'd rather just wait until either an upgrade would be REALLY worth it or at least prices come down.
      - inigyou 2mo ago
        Last time I replaced an old MB it was only $60. What prices are you seeing? It wasn't the same model or vendor MB but it was a compatible one. Same chipset.
        milch 2mo ago
        The cheapest compatible one I can see new (and one of the only ones...) is currently at 120: https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?N=100007625%20601413455%20601409741%20601413372%204131&Order=1 https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?N=100007625%20601413455%20601409... That's actually not bad, last time I checked the only ones that were in stock cost 300+ (IIRC all x570). My plan then was to maybe get a new case and rebuild it on a micro ATX board which are generally more available and seem to have a few decent options in the ~80 price range. Anyway, again it's a question of is it worth it spending several hundred and the time it takes to rebuild. It currently "works" fine except it takes 5 minutes to boot and is unable to save any BIOS settings like XMP, fan curves, and so on (and yes I changed the CMOS battery - there's a long thread on the ASRock forums of others having the same issue even after the battery is swapped). The non-optimal settings probably eat a few % of performance but other than that it's mostly annoyance, so it still feels like if I'm going to invest any more in it, it better be more worth it
    - rpunkfu 2mo ago
      It sounds like whining for the sake of it really.
  - toaste_ 2mo ago
    So, you have DDR4? Pick any B550 with a VRM heatsink for $90, a 5600 for $190, and you are back in business. Get a 5070 or 9070 before GDDR supply is completely gone if you want an actual upgrade. As for GPU price, that Vega 64 was $500 in 2018. Even a midrange GPU hasn't been $300 since the Radeon RX 480 launched a decade ago.
    - SuperNinKenDo 2mo ago
      This is essentially what I did and it worked a treat. Get in while the getting's still good. Having a modern but DDR4 compatible system is not obly a great way to get up and running now, but will help see you through this crisis long term.
      - jquery 2mo ago
        Reading this thread I am so frickin glad I built a monster DDR4 workstation back in 2021. It would cost me more to build out that computer today (dual 3090s, 512GB ECC, 3995wx). Ram was so cheap back then.
        clircle 2mo ago
        Very neat. What's the power draw on this machine?
        jquery 2mo ago
        From the wall: 260W idle, ~1200W load (1600W PSU)
    - throwatdem12311 2mo ago
      Just bought a B550 and a Ryzen 5 5500. Both were on sale on newegg. 30-40% off so and under 200 bucks. Grabbed a new case since my current one is practically falling apart. Will be back in business in a couple days. Thanks for the advice.
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    Buy an old motherboard compatible with your existing CPU. Reuse the CPU and RAM.
  - cmrdporcupine 2mo ago
    Similar thing happened here with my kid's 10 year old gaming PC. Motherboard dead. Had an existing 1070 and 16GB of DDR4. New DDR5 wasn't going to happen. New GPU wasn't going to happen. So I just got a Ryzen5 and an AM5 motherboard and re-used everything else. It runs just fine. It's fast enough. Same I just built a dual Broadwell Xeon E5 server / NAS. Why? Because someone local was selling a cheap Chinese X99 motherboard, two Xeons, and 64GB of DDR4 RAM for $150 CAD. The deal was too good. So I built a machine around it. (Though what I should have done was shove it into an old Dell T630/730, and saved myself some hassle.) Now is the time of re-using old tech.
  - Saris 2mo ago
    I'd spend the $100 on a replacement motherboard if it was me, better than not being able to use the PC. Could be less than $100 if buying used too maybe!
bahmboo 2mo ago
There's always the BC 250 route. Takes some work but seems cool.
HaloZero 2mo ago
How does the steam machine compare to building your own?
- kllrnohj 2mo ago
  Building your own is cheaper, although not by a ton. Valve isn't taking a loss on them.
  - milch 2mo ago
    Yeah, just barely, and only if you don't value warranty or build time. I'm also not super sure you could get something together that is somewhat compact like the steam machine and still be cheaper. I've built two PCs in the last 5 years and both have had parts that were broken from the factory... There is something to be said about being able to hand off troubleshooting and replacement. I had ASRock pointing fingers at everything else to the point where I had swapped out CPU, PSU, and RAM, until they relented and replaced the motherboard (the replacement which is broken again now 5 years later by the way...)
    - mancerayder 2mo ago
      I always get the highest end components I can find, and I try to stick with Asus and not the cheapest PSU. I've never had anything fail, and I do this every 5 years or so. I hate having to put the fan on the CPU after sticking that in the motherboard, and the cabling is always annoying (although 5x less annoying than it was in the days of IDE and SCSI ribbon cables). Do you trust the brand and models of the gear you're buying? Use Newegg for reviews even if you buy from Amazon?
      - milch 2mo ago
        I bought from Newegg both times. The first time it was an ASRock MB that was dead, and to be fair, the issue here was that some part was on backorder so by the time everything arrived and I put it together I had to deal with ASRock RMA rather than the Newegg returns department. Typically I choose pretty high end components as well, I do Corsair PSUs & RAM, Samsung SSD, ASUS GPU. Definitely learned my lesson on the MB and went with ASUS for the latest build as well... though that MB's DIMM_B slot was dead. I'm just glad I ended up getting 2x16G of RAM right away instead of starting with 1x16 like I originally planned, because I would have never realized the problem until getting the second stick
Mistletoe 2mo ago
Use the money to short the market because it’s probably a top signal of some sort.
kotaKat 2mo ago
I was in a shittier financial situation the past several years, finally get things situated to finally be able to buy a miniPC or one of those cool mini-laptops... then the Trump tariffs decimated the entire market. That finally starts to ease pressure... then the AI RAM boom happens and now I can't even buy memory for anything I've got and I'm trapped in 8GB baseline RAM hell. Every plan I had to update my network, my home, all out the window. I haven't seen my Steam library in at least a year or two now.
the__alchemist 2mo ago
I hear you. I'm the fool who bought an RTX4080 because "$1600 is too much for a GPU". (RTX4090; shipped to your door from the nvidia website). I don't think there's any reasonable upgrade path right nor or in the near future which would have been better than just buying that.
damontal 2mo ago
My feeds are full of ads by gaming pc makers now renting out gaming pcs for a monthly fee. NZXT calls it a lease with a 2 year refresh.
- throwatdem12311 2mo ago
  You will own nothing and be happy.
snazz 2mo ago
I bought a desktop with “strange and undesirable” hardware (an Intel discrete GPU) from Facebook Marketplace at a substantial discount to any new machine with the same performance. Perhaps consider that route if you’re just looking for a stopgap?
stephen_cagle 2mo ago
Ouch, yeah. I hate to say it, but I have been using Geforce Now ($130 a year when they run their regular discounts) Premium for most of my gaming needs. I hate the lack of competition in the space (Onlive, Google's goofy ass gaming thing), but at this time cloud rendered gaming is at least 1 order of magnitude cheaper than building your own system. I play from a browser tab in Linux. Too high latency for Clair Obscura (and obviously Dark Souls) level reaction time. Though surprisingly passable for most FPS (I just played "Ready or Not" on it yesterday, and it was acceptable).
yymir 2mo ago
What specs could have possibly bought 10 year ago? And what part of your pc died? CPU? Motherboard? PSU?

My own PC died and now I’m locked out of my entire Steam library for the foreseeable future. A $2000 PC is literally a downgrade from what I bought 10 freaking years ago. What the freaking hell.

stephenitis 2mo ago

What part of your PC died?

throwatdem12311 2mo ago
Motherboard. New motherboard…so new cpu socket (mine was Broadwell)…and new ram needed. GPU is mostly fine and can probably reuse that but it’s Vega so not the greatest I was due for an upgrade but the prices of everything is ridiculous. The thought of pc-of-Theseus’ing my busted ass PC is just sad. Thank god I bought a PS5 Pro before Sony started jacking up the prices. I remember when buying a $300 GPU was extravagant and gave you state of the art graphics.
- ed_mercer 2mo ago
  can't you just buy a used same class motherboard from a marketplace?
- pdimitar 2mo ago
  Why don't you just get a MB only for now? What mandates an entire new batch of hardware?
  - throwatdem12311 2mo ago
    I’ve been pricing out my various options but the notion of replacing a 10 year old motherboard with another 10 year old motherboard is kinda lousy. The PC I replaced when I bought this one was such a huge improvement. My options basically boils down to fixing trash that’s falling apart or a sidegrade at best for the same price as what I bought a beast of a PC for 10 freaking years ago. Depressing.
    - pdimitar 2mo ago
      Oh I agree, I am just saying that if you really did not want to spend, there are obviously options. I am thinking of promoting my super old and long-time-not-used PC with an i7-3770 and 32GB DDR3 RAM to a server and I bought a ~$45 motherboard for it some months ago, now I have to bother finding it a good NAS case and buy at least two HDDs (the real cost here). Point is, quite a lot of hardware can still do a lot. I have a Ryzen 5500U-based laptop that still outperforms the PCs of most people that I know (non-tech people). Though in my case I feel like I have to get a loan to buy a workstation + an actual gaming PC for my wife. That all is beginning to look like at least $15k... yikes. But I am not sure I can wait until 2028 to see if things _start_ normalizing... Depressing indeed.
      - alasano 2mo ago
        My Truenas setup runs on a i7-3770 with 16GB DDR3, still good tbh. Have a whole bunch of self hosted apps running on it exposed through tailscale.
    - starkrights 2mo ago
      10 year old is still DDR4, and ddr4 is still plenty fine for gaming workloads. AM4 still has some solid options out there, the 5800x3d has 3d vcache and would be an insane upgrade over any… quad core? 6th gen intel? Not sure what the AMD at the time was. 14th gen intel supports both ddr4/5 if you wanted the ram upgrade potential, but it… well, I remember it being pretty sketchy perf/degradation wise for a while, so maybe don’t go with them. I understand the sucky feeling that you’re sidegrading instead of investing in a new beastly rig for a reasonable price- believe me I’ve been in the same boat since all this GPU bullshit started. I got lucky choosing to upgrade to ddr5 years ago, but I elected not to get a GPU out of a lack of clairvoyance :(. Still though- I upgraded from an i7 6700k in 2023. The 5800x3d released a year prior to the CPU I picked up. Granted I went to zen 5, but holy shit I didn’t not realize how fucking old that 6700k was haha. The 3dvcache on AMD CPUs is a crazy, crazy boost- in addition to the fact that modern CPUs are already bounds and leagues ahead of 2016, and I would go to bet that even if it’s technically a sidegrade, you probably wouldn’t feel too horrible about the money spent. (I really want to say that you’d feel pretty satisfied with it it, but I can’t discount that I also jumped up to a higher tier zen 5 cpu, and don’t have explicit experience with the 5800x or other AM4 stuff. ymmv!)
  - milch 2mo ago
    I've been in the same boat since it seems something about the memory controller on my gaming PC's MB is broken, but price wise it feels like it just doesn't make sense. I could get something from eBay relatively cheap but then I'd probably spend an hour disassembling and reassembling just to maybe learn that the eBay unit has some equivalent issue or is slightly broken in some other way. I could old new stock for outrageous prices. Right now I'd rather just wait until either an upgrade would be REALLY worth it or at least prices come down.
    - inigyou 2mo ago
      Last time I replaced an old MB it was only $60. What prices are you seeing? It wasn't the same model or vendor MB but it was a compatible one. Same chipset.
      - milch 2mo ago
        The cheapest compatible one I can see new (and one of the only ones...) is currently at 120: https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?N=100007625%20601413455%20601409741%20601413372%204131&Order=1 https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?N=100007625%20601413455%20601409... That's actually not bad, last time I checked the only ones that were in stock cost 300+ (IIRC all x570). My plan then was to maybe get a new case and rebuild it on a micro ATX board which are generally more available and seem to have a few decent options in the ~80 price range. Anyway, again it's a question of is it worth it spending several hundred and the time it takes to rebuild. It currently "works" fine except it takes 5 minutes to boot and is unable to save any BIOS settings like XMP, fan curves, and so on (and yes I changed the CMOS battery - there's a long thread on the ASRock forums of others having the same issue even after the battery is swapped). The non-optimal settings probably eat a few % of performance but other than that it's mostly annoyance, so it still feels like if I'm going to invest any more in it, it better be more worth it
  - rpunkfu 2mo ago
    It sounds like whining for the sake of it really.
- toaste_ 2mo ago
  So, you have DDR4? Pick any B550 with a VRM heatsink for $90, a 5600 for $190, and you are back in business. Get a 5070 or 9070 before GDDR supply is completely gone if you want an actual upgrade. As for GPU price, that Vega 64 was $500 in 2018. Even a midrange GPU hasn't been $300 since the Radeon RX 480 launched a decade ago.
  - SuperNinKenDo 2mo ago
    This is essentially what I did and it worked a treat. Get in while the getting's still good. Having a modern but DDR4 compatible system is not obly a great way to get up and running now, but will help see you through this crisis long term.
    - jquery 2mo ago
      Reading this thread I am so frickin glad I built a monster DDR4 workstation back in 2021. It would cost me more to build out that computer today (dual 3090s, 512GB ECC, 3995wx). Ram was so cheap back then.
      - clircle 2mo ago
        Very neat. What's the power draw on this machine?
        jquery 2mo ago
        From the wall: 260W idle, ~1200W load (1600W PSU)
  - throwatdem12311 2mo ago
    Just bought a B550 and a Ryzen 5 5500. Both were on sale on newegg. 30-40% off so and under 200 bucks. Grabbed a new case since my current one is practically falling apart. Will be back in business in a couple days. Thanks for the advice.
- inigyou 2mo ago
  Buy an old motherboard compatible with your existing CPU. Reuse the CPU and RAM.
- cmrdporcupine 2mo ago
  Similar thing happened here with my kid's 10 year old gaming PC. Motherboard dead. Had an existing 1070 and 16GB of DDR4. New DDR5 wasn't going to happen. New GPU wasn't going to happen. So I just got a Ryzen5 and an AM5 motherboard and re-used everything else. It runs just fine. It's fast enough. Same I just built a dual Broadwell Xeon E5 server / NAS. Why? Because someone local was selling a cheap Chinese X99 motherboard, two Xeons, and 64GB of DDR4 RAM for $150 CAD. The deal was too good. So I built a machine around it. (Though what I should have done was shove it into an old Dell T630/730, and saved myself some hassle.) Now is the time of re-using old tech.
- Saris 2mo ago
  I'd spend the $100 on a replacement motherboard if it was me, better than not being able to use the PC. Could be less than $100 if buying used too maybe!

bahmboo 2mo ago

There's always the BC 250 route. Takes some work but seems cool.

HaloZero 2mo ago

How does the steam machine compare to building your own?

kllrnohj 2mo ago
Building your own is cheaper, although not by a ton. Valve isn't taking a loss on them.
- milch 2mo ago
  Yeah, just barely, and only if you don't value warranty or build time. I'm also not super sure you could get something together that is somewhat compact like the steam machine and still be cheaper. I've built two PCs in the last 5 years and both have had parts that were broken from the factory... There is something to be said about being able to hand off troubleshooting and replacement. I had ASRock pointing fingers at everything else to the point where I had swapped out CPU, PSU, and RAM, until they relented and replaced the motherboard (the replacement which is broken again now 5 years later by the way...)
  - mancerayder 2mo ago
    I always get the highest end components I can find, and I try to stick with Asus and not the cheapest PSU. I've never had anything fail, and I do this every 5 years or so. I hate having to put the fan on the CPU after sticking that in the motherboard, and the cabling is always annoying (although 5x less annoying than it was in the days of IDE and SCSI ribbon cables). Do you trust the brand and models of the gear you're buying? Use Newegg for reviews even if you buy from Amazon?
    - milch 2mo ago
      I bought from Newegg both times. The first time it was an ASRock MB that was dead, and to be fair, the issue here was that some part was on backorder so by the time everything arrived and I put it together I had to deal with ASRock RMA rather than the Newegg returns department. Typically I choose pretty high end components as well, I do Corsair PSUs & RAM, Samsung SSD, ASUS GPU. Definitely learned my lesson on the MB and went with ASUS for the latest build as well... though that MB's DIMM_B slot was dead. I'm just glad I ended up getting 2x16G of RAM right away instead of starting with 1x16 like I originally planned, because I would have never realized the problem until getting the second stick

Mistletoe 2mo ago

Use the money to short the market because it’s probably a top signal of some sort.

kotaKat 2mo ago

I was in a shittier financial situation the past several years, finally get things situated to finally be able to buy a miniPC or one of those cool mini-laptops... then the Trump tariffs decimated the entire market. That finally starts to ease pressure... then the AI RAM boom happens and now I can't even buy memory for anything I've got and I'm trapped in 8GB baseline RAM hell. Every plan I had to update my network, my home, all out the window. I haven't seen my Steam library in at least a year or two now.

the__alchemist 2mo ago

I hear you. I'm the fool who bought an RTX4080 because "$1600 is too much for a GPU". (RTX4090; shipped to your door from the nvidia website). I don't think there's any reasonable upgrade path right nor or in the near future which would have been better than just buying that.

damontal 2mo ago

My feeds are full of ads by gaming pc makers now renting out gaming pcs for a monthly fee. NZXT calls it a lease with a 2 year refresh.

throwatdem12311 2mo ago
You will own nothing and be happy.

snazz 2mo ago

I bought a desktop with “strange and undesirable” hardware (an Intel discrete GPU) from Facebook Marketplace at a substantial discount to any new machine with the same performance. Perhaps consider that route if you’re just looking for a stopgap?

stephen_cagle 2mo ago

Ouch, yeah. I hate to say it, but I have been using Geforce Now ($130 a year when they run their regular discounts) Premium for most of my gaming needs. I hate the lack of competition in the space (Onlive, Google's goofy ass gaming thing), but at this time cloud rendered gaming is at least 1 order of magnitude cheaper than building your own system. I play from a browser tab in Linux. Too high latency for Clair Obscura (and obviously Dark Souls) level reaction time. Though surprisingly passable for most FPS (I just played "Ready or Not" on it yesterday, and it was acceptable).

yymir 2mo ago

What specs could have possibly bought 10 year ago? And what part of your pc died? CPU? Motherboard? PSU?