This is a pretty big tell that it has nothing to do with AI, it’s just price gouging for price gouging sake’s. Data center setups don’t use consumer level PSUs and CPU coolers. If anything, their price should be going down given that the rise in RAM, SSDs, and GPUs are leading to people building less PCs and waiting longer to do so. The supply for these components should be going up due to excess supply.
Data center setups don’t use consumer level PSUs and CPUs.
CPU coolers, not CPUs.
And presumably the raw materials are the same for server PSUs and heatsinks, which is the explanation (true or not) for price hikes given in the article:
The company explained that prices for key upstream materials such as copper, silver, and tin have continued to climb over the past few months due to global market conditions.
These mother fuckers are nickel and diming us on fucking tin now? That’s how you get riots
Thanks for the correction, I meant CPU coolers, which ironically are even less affected by the “key upstream materials” you quote since they are mostly made out of aluminum alloys. The price hike on raw materials, while real, is much less than the effect of surplus should be on the market, and they affect everything through inflation. Don’t just take their word for it, look at the 10-year historical graphs, they follow a general trend.
At this rate, my PC will be in service into the 2030’s. Crazy considering I built it like 8 years ago.
i guess i will finally be forced to go through my steam backlog.
PC will be
ina service into the 2030’sI think this is the main goal, otherwise you can’t fully enslave consumers/citizens.
So glad I built mine last year. I still wish I had gotten a bit more ram but I didn’t realize that the price gouging I was fighting at the time was just the beginning.
Who knows what technology will bring us in 5 years. With SSDs, 15 year old machines are still functional for about everything but gaming.
‘New AAA gaming’ you mean.
We have millions of good gameplay hours in old titles.
Unevolve, unadapt!And indie titles not using Unreal.
Oh, devolve is a word, but I have only heard it used on procedural dramas to describe serial killers who stop following their patterns.
Oddly specific, but chuckle worthy still.
Please send me some ideas! Free titles are better since I don’t have a library of older games. I was able to get Minecraft to a playable state, but Hollow Knight couldn’t do more than 4fps. I though Neverwinter might work since it was pretty old, but I only managed what appeared to be 1/4 fps. I’m running tests on a core 2 machine with an ATI Radeon HD4250, Fedora on a SSD, 6 GB of DDR 2.
The purpose is to spread the information to people who might be struggling with win 10 or older computers that can’t upgrade. I’m offering the Linux upgrade for $10 plus the cost of a SSD. I’m only posting to my Facebook crowd because I can’t do much for people who aren’t close.
I will gladly post on Lemmy if I keep going. We have until the test computer is sold. Then I am moving on to the pile of Optiplex 9010 computers I bought for testing.
… you charge 10 monies for stuff we are willing to do for free to people that didn’t even ask for Linux??
/s (tho that is steep compared to less than 10 monies worth of 'puters)
A few from here, bcs I listed a few already:
Doom(s), Quake(s), Unreal, Deus Ex, Elder Scrolls (Arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind), Thief(s), Dungeon Keeper(s), Carmageddon, Fallout(s), Resident Evil(s), Vampire: The Masquerade, Hitman(s), Clive Barker’s Undying, Gothic(s), Half-Life, Tomb Raider(s), Myst(s), Monkey Island(s), Baldur’s Gate(s), Icewind Dale(s), Diablo(s), GTA(s), KotOR, Outcast, Serious Sam(s), Cave Story, Stardew Valley, Terraria, Celeste, Momodora(s?), Spelunky (classic), …But perhaps there are emulators & ppl can play some of these games from their phones (with a keyboard, on their monitors or TVs)?
They won’t let me do it for for free. They think I’m doing bad things if I don’t charge for it.
Thanks for the list!
I recommend this metroidvania, if you like puzzles and riddles. La-Mulana is an experience.
Looks amazing!
It’s a great game, Spelunky from my list takes a lot from it.
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Hell, I have a Sandy Bridge based machine I built in 2012. It’s getting there, 14 years old now, and with its 1080ti in there it can still play most games just fine. It’s not my primary rig anymore but it’s still trucking the same as it ever was.
Mainstream PC performance really hit its plateau by, when, like 2018? I imagine somebody with a machine that’s only 8 years old will probably do just fine unless some critical and irreplaceable component in it explodes.
It’ll be cloud-based rental computing with compulsory AI spyware and tiered pricing that determines what they allow you to do. The base tier will have just a whopping 2GB of RAM and 30GB for all your file storage needs for just $25 per month. If, one month, you can’t afford it, no computing for you, and goodbye software and data. The small print will specify that anything you create on Microsoft 365 Cloud Copilot Windows Home Edition for Teams of Peasants and Serfs is Microsoft’s property for all eternity to use, share or sell as they see fit, and you waive any right to ever challenge them legally and will accept a $5 Copilot 365 for Teams gift card in compensation should Microsoft’s AI incorrectly recommend you for death by ICE. Private messaging will be impossible and Linux or (heaven forbid) non-vibe programming will be punishable by up to 20 years in prison and a fine of millions of dollars.
Innovation is so exciting. It will have cute little animated AI chums tailored to our individual personalities and consumption profiles, reporting our every move to the authorities for our own safety and the safety of the children! I can’t wait!
Idk, even browsing the web nowadays takes a shitton of processing power
I was doing okay with 4-5 tabs on a core 2. Used Facebook as a test.
CPU cooler, as in, cheap-ass fans and a slab of metal with fins? Is that hard to come by too? Or is it professional grifters at work…
This is why we can’t have nice things.
(I know radiators are more than metal slabs, fans can be quite elaborate, and there can be liquid in the mix, but seriously)
Give me enough time off and I can make my own CPU cooler. There’s no way a shortage is happening, this is non-news trying to grab clicks.
Especially since servers can do more sophisticated cooling systems than the average home user, like dunking the entire system in oil.
Just trying to kill the DIY PC market. You will buy the Paystation, Xbox, and Steam machine and like it. No user upgradable hardware. Only upgradable models. All non-console GPUs, CPUs, and DRAM are for AI alone.
That implies there’s some thought behind this. Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.
Never attribute to profit?
Sure… but I don’t think there’s any particular malice towards people that build PCs. Just greed and incompetence. Gotta buy up GPUs that there isn’t enough electricity to run to drive up the share prices!
But when the bubble bursts and hardware gets cheap, is that something we’d considered to be goodwill towards people building PCs? Or will it just be a side-benefit of incompetence?
Just ebbs and flows of incompetence to me.
I figure I would just stop at greed. I don’t think there’s incompetence, they know what they’re doing to maximize profit. Our concerns being DIY PC builders are pretty low on their radar.
Bezos was talking about computer rental being the future of the market.
Presumably with him reaping the rewards.
Yeah, just read that article here. Follow the money. They never stop enshittifying, trying to force people into walled gardens that are as shittily built and expensive as possible.
This has nothing to do with needing semiconductor and micro controller factories though. You can build these from any electronics fabrication company on earth pretty much, so I expect that a bunch of people will fill in the gap if the prices start going up like crazy.
This timeline sucks
Are you all ready for subscription based PCs? Because they are going to make sure that’s the only way you can afford decent hardware.
Nvidia already does this with their game streaming service. Buy cheap hardware for yourself, then play games as if you’re running a 5090.
But eventually you won’t have a choice. They will make they hardware entirely unaffordable.
I am trying to decide whether to buy a chassis, because I am not sure if this style would be around when DDR6 is released. The Thor Rosewill V2 went extinct, so I might buy the Thor NAS.
I wish that there was a Thor V3.
Im skeptical of this. I think the opposite might happen, at least in terms of supply. Ramm/GPU price hikes are all supply driven. If no one is building/buying a computer due to increased ramm/GPU prices, then I bet a lot of PSUs/coolers/cases and other consumer gear that isn’t used in the datacenter will be overstocked.
Basic economics is understamding supply-demand. Advanced economics is knowing when it’s being manipulated.
When theres increased demand, companies raise prices because of scarcity. When theres decreased demand, they raise prices so they can make their profits over fewer units sold.
This works in a vacuum, but falls apart once you have competition to drive prices down. That said, the world is falling into cartels that price fix anyway.
Companies (e.g. HP, Dell, Lenovo) will still buy PCs. The individual like you and me will be a drop in a bucket as big as the whole ocean.
True, but the coolers/psus/cases in OEMs are dog shit by comparison. Very different markets.
I have to agree. I mean come on, cpu coolers? There’s nothing proprietary about them, nothing particularly high tech or difficult to produce, it’s a heat sink and a fan… Fancy ones may have a coolant loop, but still… I just can’t see any reason that prices would go up noticeably for such easy to manufacturer, commodity parts.
I’m just saying, it seems a little early to start screaming “the sky is falling”.
They still have to be made from something, and it just so happens that ‘something’ overlaps with stuff datacenters currently vacuum out of the market
Copper? Is there really a copper shortage?
I mean, the supply is pretty large for that. You’d think that electrical grid rollout in developing nations would have a higher impact than all the ram in the world.
Apparently yeah
This literally makes no sense, unless they’re claiming the crisis will hit entire metal industry and basic electronic parts like fans and caps
Then again, beginning to manufacture basic parts is not a question of years, if such demand happens, it will be solved fairly quickly
ok so what stocks to buy?
Power Supply OEMs: “Hey! We want in on the price gouging too!”
Are there notable constraints for ‘just making more’ of these items?
Like I know short term shortages are possible for everything, but what components of a PSU or Cooler are difficult to source or manufacture? Combined with consumer versions of these not typically having a lot of direct overlap with their datacenter counterparts, do we really think this is going to be a major issue?
This increase is due to the cost of copper and tin shooting up. Copper is up 45% over the past year. Coolers are basically nothing but copper. Copper is hitting record highs due to much larger economic pressures too large for a Lemmy comment. So like if you want to find untapped copper vein and start a mining company then yeah you can lower the price but that’s about the only way right now.
I looked around a bit more after this site wouldn’t load and it seems like you are ahead of me, you hit the real reason.
Raw material costs seems to be the primary problem.
Most coolers are aluminium actually.
Heatsink fins are aluminum. Heatpipes are usually copper. I’m sure we’ll start seeing even less copper and more aluminum.
It says in the article.
The reason given is rising raw materials costs, i.e. metals, and the price increases they’re talking about are on the order of around 10% which is obviously a slap in the face along with everything else that’s going on in the hardware world, but by the same token pretty minimal compared to said selfsame everything else.
I think I paid $40 for my CPU cooler. So, if I ever need to buy a another one for some reason and now it’s $44, well, I guess I’ll live.
