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
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.
ok so what stocks to buy?
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.
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.
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 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.
This timeline sucks
At this rate, my PC will be in service into the 2030’s. Crazy considering I built it like 8 years ago.
PC will be
ina service into the 2030’sI think this is the main goal, otherwise you can’t fully enslave consumers/citizens.
i guess i will finally be forced to go through my steam backlog.
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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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!
I put this on my calendar for next week, I appreciate it
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.
Sandy bridge still has a little life in it. Most those systems top out at 8-16 GB memory, which is serviceable. You are probably missing out on NVME. The PCI version might also be a gotcha if you upgrade your video card, so double check the compatibility.
Finally, your previously-suggested video card may require new power connectors. While you might be able to find adapters, confirm that your are not approaching 80% of your PSU capability and upgrade if you are close. Power supplies degrade over time, so if you are at 65% it’s time to consider an upgrade on a 10yo PSU.
Fortunately (?) my PSU let the smoke out about three years after I bought the initial one for that build which had IIRC a pair of 7950GTs in it from my previous machine, in SLI. So I had the opportunity to throw a modern-ish Corsair 850w power supply in it which has all the modular plugs I need. That box has had a succession of random graphics cards in it ranging from that old pair of 7950GTs, then a GTX680, then finally my current GTX1080Ti. Honestly, the 1080 is still plenty enough for most games in 1080p (possibly serendipitously) as long as you don’t feel the pathological need for raytracing or frame generation.
You can sidestep the NVMe issue as long as you don’t care about 100% speed by slapping a PCIe to NVMe adapter board in one of your handy unused x16 slots now that you’re no longer using SLI (if that reminds you of anyone you know). I’m not certain booting off of that is viable and I haven’t bothered to try to figure it out, so the boot drive in that machine is a SATA SSD currently.
On the bright side, that board has ten SATA ports so turning into a drive farm is a trivial prospect if you’re into that kind of thing.
I can’t say how your firmware will recognize a PCI-e to NVME, but as long as your aren’t chasing boot time records a SATA SSD should be more than sufficient for boot. You could just use the NVME for speed.
Another option would be to set up 6 SATA SSD drives in there with ZFS2. The striping and read-write speeds should significantly fill the SATA buffer of 6gbps. Due to the striping, you might actually avoid filing the read buffer and be about to sustain a longer high write speed.
The drive farm is also super viable. I have a 6-port board and a SAS card installed giving me 10 or 14 ports, I can’t recall. I have a similar strategy as I described, but I’m only using it for a NAS. I looked into getting a 12-port board, but used it was still $350. It makes more sense for me to buy another SAS card instead.
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.
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.
Or it’ll be like buying a used car, 36 monthly payments and your PC will finally be yours!
I think we’re already there.
More like you’ll access better hardware over the web with a subscription fee.
And NVidia are ramping up their subsciption prices already…
I can hook you up right now with a solid Dell Optiplex 9010, your choice Windows or Linux, just $15.99 a month lease. If anything goes wrong with the hardware, we’ll send you a new one and you just ship the old one back.
*Not responsible for lost data due to failure to use proper backup strategies.
I’d recommend to dystopia a bit harder - if this type of CaaS happens, I expect you won’t get to lay a finger on any real local computing hardware. I think you’d have a computing equivalent of a Raspberry Pi which is DRM-locked to a specific service provider’s cloud computing services, and a remote desktop or streaming GPU service.
I mean, at that point it’s ethical to raid data centers
I’ll absofuckinglutely assist in providing an alternative.
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.
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
I think that reasoning works for PSUs as power conversion may use the same components (do datacenters even run on AC power tho? Or do they run DC and then step down?), but most consumer CPU coolers are milled alluminium plus a fan, the only overlap I can imagine are the heatpipes.
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.
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.
The machinery. Takes years to make and has to be maintained and only had a certain output. It’s been this way for 100s of years.
And the market waves means that companies don’t want to buy machines so they can’t use them once the price goes back down.
Yeah, but these are not exactly complex parts, especially compared to RAM/etc. RAM fabrication is orders of magnitude more difficult than the parts we’re looking at here.
I’m not saying it’s something someone could get going tomorrow, but beyond the PCB for the PSU everything else is fairly standard and mostly interchangeable. People have made PSUs in their basements. And, for CPU coolers, it’s effectively a piece of metal with a fan attached. If we’ve lost the capability to machine more aluminum and copper I feel like our problems have evolved beyond computer hardware.
For any mass produced item the amount of factory machinery available is a very “notable constraint”
Biggest and probably current constraint is the time it takes to create new manufacturing facilities. With how bad things are, I would imagine they have already maxed the output of the available production lines.
From what I’ve seen working in manufacturing and production facilities, it takes a handful of years to set up new production lines and many more to set up while new production facilities.
I feel super fortunate for having just built a new machine just months ago. Otherwise I would have had to dial down the specs a lot.
In any case this AI thing has got to topple
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