AI is killing people and civilization.

A few companies or departments have already shuttered for this exact reason.

There's a lot of overlap in those two groups

Right wing lunatics are big in both.

Crypto because the hurrdurr keep gubmint outta my lyfe shit (despite the fact that crypto is infinitely more easy to track than cash..), and AI because they hate liberal reality, so AI lets them generate all the videos they could hope to have to validate their fake victimhoods.

Even if AI somehow falls off the trend, I feel like we'll see another stupid way to throw mountains of processing power at something. I can't wait to see what goofy shit they'll come up with.

Its the necessary pieces for the next steps. They need crypto for programmable money so they can turn you off, digital ID so they can track your every move in the modern world, AI combined with mass surveillance to enforce it all. Someone wants this world, thats for sure.

That's absolutely the end goal. You'll own nothing and you'll like it.

Don't worry they'll turn their datacenters into virtual PC hosting so that people who can't afford to upgrade will have to rent the hardware...

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

AI are the devs now. And efficient code is probably the last thing they are known for doing.

I had exactly the same experience and I use the Linux machine for gaming.

Replacing Windows with Linux feels equivalent to a CPU and memory upgrade.

New is nice, but not at these prices, yeesh. I built my new rig just before the RAMpocalypse. And also the rig before that in 2020 just before the crypto had inflated the GPU prices too high. Call me lucky. Hopefully the prices go down in about five years. 😅

Gratz, good decision.

I live on the other side of the pond and did not build a new rig in 2024, because the tariffs were never going to affect me much... Did not foresee the bubble inflating this big though. I originally wanted to build in autumn 2025, now I have no idea when it'll actually happen.

In online communities at least, people seem to be keen to stay on the cutting edge and always have the best and shiniest. Toms Hardware is going to attract this very audience.

I accept that I'm probably too far the other way on the spectrum of patient gamers......but people don't seem to think of the utility of the item and rather stay obsessed with "10% performance gains". For the vast majority of people, phones, laptops and computers can easily last over 5 years (sometimes 10 years depending on use case).

Although these frequent upgraders do give a good stock of items for people like me to pick up and stay in the sweetspot of positioning behind the frontline of cutting edge products on the secondhand market.

Anecdotally but several of my friends build a new PC and then slide their old one to siblings who game but don't need high end

Yeah I found that strange too most of my gaming PCs have lasted me somewhere between 7 and 10 years. Would seem completely unnecessary for most people

I would imagine that 40% is saying that hoping for a best case scenario to occur. Prices haven't even plateaued yet, they are still rising, so at some point regardless their enthusiasm they will be priced out of the market.

The thought that hardware prices will drop to normal levels in the next few years is just wishful thinking.

I replaced my old PC only because I went from an i5 6600 to a ryzen 7800x3d and thus needed to replace the RAM as well.
Combone that with an old 4GB 960 and an older 2TB HDD and wanting another case the math was quite easy.

It's alao a quesrion how you interpret that? At what point is it a new PC vs upgrading? If you have replaced all parts from the original starting build?
Might explain the higher percentage

I recently built new to pass my current rig to my kid who is only interested in Roblox and other smaller games. And I mean the entire rig, including the desk.

Don't forget this market insanity started around COVID, and has basically been succeeded by consequent crises with few dips.

The typical release cadence of PC components is around 4-6 years, which requires new motherboard, CPU, and RAM.
Adding in the GPU basically results in a new build, and that's being generous assuming no upgrades/changes to other parts like PSU and storage.

My take is that a lot of these people wishing to upgrade are those who have simply been holding out since 2020 or earlier. This seems to vaguely match up with the Steam Hardware results, with a fair number of people still using RTX 3000 series or RX 6000 series, of which even the top end cards are starting to become par/outperformed by their modern mid level counterparts.

I don't believe in "just upgrading" at this point. If you built your PC with efficiency in mind, there's like nothing you can even "upgrade". Anything I can think of will get outdated by the time you need the next thing. A new GPU? Oh, you are still on Gen3... that means a new motherboard. Updating from AM4 to AM..4? Nah that feels like bad value, but AM5 requires DDR5, both of which have already been out for almost 5 years and will likely get replaced in a year or 2. Upgrading RAM? Again, just bumping DDR4 for a marginally better/larger cap DDR4 feels like bad value and unwarranted. Storage? Whoops, your old motherboard doesn't support NVMe booting and it's BIOS hasn't been touched in over 5 years! You are lucky if you even have an M.2 slot.

And believe it or not, these prices are not even the worst they've ever been, so might as well just get a new PC every 5 or so years, maybe keep your old storage, CPU cooler, PSU and case, but that's about it.

I finally got round to a significant upgrade to my PC last week. I've been running the same PC for 10 years, and it's really been dying. Fans and HDDs were failing, and it couldn't play new games at all.

I haven't replaced my GPU (still on a GTX 980ti) but I jumped to some decent DDR4 RAM, a better CPU, and moved into an SFF case, but I have no confidence any prices are set to stabilise, so I just gave in and built what I could.

I think you may overestimate how many people build their PCs instead of buying a prebuilt.

It can be people budding into the genre. They’ve heard about how nice Steam is, and maybe play some games on a cheap laptop, but recognize a genuine desktop is the better experience.

One streamer I follow is in that situation. She streams off her PS5 and Switch, but has a donation incentive to help build her PC.

I might fall in that category, depending on how they'd ask me. I have a solid PC I built after crypto stopped inflating the prices but just before the RAM shortage and I'm mostly good, but I've got the money and have been thinking I could upgrade soon as a treat. Not at these prices though.

So it all depends if the situation improves in the next two years somewhat. This year? No chance, IMO. next year? Maybe. Maybe I'm too optimistic. But I definitely wouldn't rule out be building a new PC in that timeframe.

i built a monster pc in 2024 and maxed out the RAM and CPU the motherboard could handle. New 4k monitor and a 32gb RTX video card. I think I spent about $1.5k

no way could I get that stuff for the same price. I could probably sell the parts for more

it's still a monster and in Linux, I can tweak it just a bit more to get everything it can give.

I'm thinking that the way games have progressed in the last 5 years, there's nothing on the horizon that says prepare for the new technology that will blow my mind

This is what I've done for 35 years. My current build is almost seven years old. My previous build, now 12 years old, is my current media server, the ones before that are recycled.

Also, by the time I build a new one, I need to research everything all over again, because it's all changed so much. I don't keep up with the hardware very well between builds.

I don't think this defeats the purpose, as I don't expect a computer to last forever. I do reuse what few parts I can, such as power supplies, cases, fans, and hard drives.

I think it's always been like that, unless you upgrade a CPU for a 10% improvement.

I tended to do GPU as one upgrade, then the rest a few years later, treating the RAM, CPU and mobo as one unit.

But since prices of everything have been out of whack for ages now, I'm sticking with this 1060/i5-8400 box until something gives. If I want the latest whizzo graphics, I'll play my PS5.

From my own experience I would say that you're probably not finding a chance to do intermediary upgrades because upfront you bought the top-range everything and maxed out things like memory and storage, and/or did not get a really good hobbyist motherboard (which is the part where you should really splurge).

I don't get into the muggers' game of top-range were you pay 2x-3x for just an extra 10% performance but instead get the stuff at the sweet-spot of price-performance, and then some years latter I can get stuff with what was before top-range performance at normal prices without a premium.

Similarly I don't max out on things like memory and storage from the very start - I get what I need then and when I see that I need more I get more, by which point normally (not this shit going on right now) Moore's Law means it's way cheaper.

For example, the PC I'm using now for gaming recently got an improved CPU which wasn't even out when I first bought this PC and which was near top range back then (as server CPU, even), which would've been $200 back then but was only $17 second hand some years later.

Of course, this way of doing things got totally fucked up with this PC parts bubble. Frankly the last PC upgrade I did was replacing Windows with Linux which in terms of how it feels was equivalent to a CPU and memory upgrade.

Mine is about 7 and I keep forgetting it’s not “current gen” because it still runs new games at mid-high settings at the framerate and resolutions I care about.

that's especially true since games just kinda stopped looking better imo. i think 2014-2019 was the peak of game graphics, i just can't stand that smeary ai upscaled temporal anti-aliasing look, i prefer msaa or just plain ssaa, it looks so much crisper

Yeah, the $80 dollar AAA games are presumably going to price enough people out that there's no need to upgrade anyway. 😬

Thank goodness indies are usually more interesting anyway.

Same boat brother! Honestly I haven't found anything yet that my AM4 doesn't crush. Sure someday I'll replace it. Someday.

competitor manufacturer

There's Chinese ram that's becoming good. But that doesn't mean Americans will be allowed to buy it.

But really gamers are the worst about consumerism. Nvidia is the worst and gamers keep going back. Steve from Gamer's Nexus had a funny chart in one of his videos a year or so ago. It was a flow chart about gamer spending on hardware showing all the advantages of AMD and Intel in gaming with a big arrow at the bottom that was labeled something like "And then you ignore everything and give all your money to Nvidia."