PC Building NOW is Unaffordable.

Lance1 said:

My PC build is the last PC build for me. Who can you afford the costs of RAM Storage GPU PSU CPU and the list gos on. I built my PC in 2024 and the total coste for my build was $2,500.00. And I Most Likely overspent at that too. Look at my specs! Yesterday I looked up all my PC parts and to build my PC with all that I have now would coste me $4,500.00!!! OMG! Did I pick the right time to build my PC or not? So is anyone out there planning a new build??? I bet not...

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Already the gurus are referring to 2024 as the last year of the Golden Age of PC building. Steve from Gamer's Nexus, Jay from Jay's Two Cents, even Wendell from Level 1 Techs agree that those days are gone. Yes, you picked precisely the right time. Motherboard manufacturers are reporting a 30% (or higher) decrease in system board sales. This isn't just happening with ASUS, MSI, and GIGABYTE but pretty much all manufacturers across the board. (No pun intended.) It stands to reason when the RAM that an enthusiast pays for can easily amount to 3X the cost of the system board itself. One needs a really good reason for building a brand new system apart from enthusiasm.

Sure. It started with system memory but it didn't take long before the process dominoed. NVMe prices doubled and then tripled, SSDs doubled in price, and now, as I predicted would happen, anything silicon went up in price. The builder is drowning in an avalanche of inflation. TBH I'm surprised the PC you built (I saw the pictures) didn't run closer to the 7G mark to replace. In Canada it's a nightmare.

Even when I stopped building PCs for strangers I would still occasionally build one for a family member or a friend. I can't even do that now. Nobody can realistically afford to pay for a decent brand new PC. I must have been on the right track though as I kept urging others to keep their old PCs and stick to upgrading if at all possible. My motivation for this was different: I could see how users were being manipulated through engineered obsolescence and I didn't like it. I could also see (from the mountains of discarded desktops in transfer stations) the obvious impact this was having on the environment. Just because I'm pro capitalism doesn't mean I don't care about the ecosystem. The AI syndrome was the last straw for me. So much hype and gas lighting committed in the name of artificial advancement. None of this was an accident. All of it was strategically orchestrated to milk the end user for every dime.

I have enough old PCs (and RAM) to keep me occupied until these old fingers can't put stuff together anymore. In fact, I'm really excited now because I just discovered a way to redeem my X299 SAGE build without having to shell out more bux after experiencing a catastrophic hardware failure. Sadly, I have to start again from scratch, but I won't be losing any coin. Meanwhile, for those who are looking to build Work Stations, there are currently some very affordable X299 system boards available on E Bay, many of them brand spanking new, at a fraction of the cost they originally sold for. I'm half tempted to buy one just as a backup. Go look. Some of these are being sold with RAM.