RAM kits are now sold with one fake RAM stick alongside a real one
tomshardware.com
tomshardware.com
We still appreciated visually stunning PCs. Not just for the works of art that they were, but also for the DIY skill and ethic you were actually required to demonstrate to build and mod them.
Nowadays, it's all just "RGB by default". By my angry old man standards, it looks gauche. Then again, I suppose it's the new vanilla?
No more scouring junk yards for a particular heater core from wrecked cars or modding aquarium pumps.
That being said, I also never really understood the "add colorful lights to your PC" aspect of some builds.
I have never used a lit case.
https://www.silverstonetek.com/en/product/info/computer-chas...
Ah, the good ol' days.
Then again I'm typing this from a Thinkpad - maybe that says something about my aesthetic preferences for computers.
[0] https://www.silverstonetek.com/en/product/info/computer-chas...
15 bucks of rattlecans will make any case beige. :)
I'm sort of waiting for a motherboard manufacturer to weigh in though. Even the "pro" ranges tend to be black PCBs with a lot of complex silkscreening. The boards that don't have any of that tend to be OEM-tier boards with skimpy features. Surely someone can make an X870E-VINTAGE board with a green or yellow-brown substrate, no nonsense silkscreening, and finned brass heatsinkage that looks like the sort of thing you saw permanently glued to your 486DX2/66 CPU?
I want the aesthetic, but that can still be implemented in the context of no-compromises modern hardware.
Seems these days that they’re not optional for most things remotely gaming related (e.g. motherboards, graphics cards) , but fortunately can generally be disabled or if illumination is useful (e.g for a keyboard), they can be configured to be white only, which was useful for the Steel Series keyboard I purchased. (I wouldn’t recommend Steel Series keyboards though, has stupid design choices and reliability issues.)
Also did LAN gaming back in the day. Computers were so much more work to lug around when you had a CRT and HDDs. These days desktop computers are far easier to transport.
It’s an old motherboard though, bought in 2018, but I would expect the option to be available on new ones too.
Back in my day™, I remember full super tower cases made from steel when they had 8-10 5.25" HH front bays. They were boat anchors and they were generally terrible at managing heat and airflow.
On the other hand, I’m building my daughter a gaming PC for her birthday, and she loves the RGB, I set everything to a pastel blue that matches her Cinnamoroll Razer mouse, keyboard, mousepad, [0] with a Cinnamoroll desk mat I got shipped from China. She only knows about half of that (hard to hide an entire PC while I’m working on debloating windows), and is super excited.
I’ll admit I’m pushing 40 and bought a red mouse to go with my red backlit keyboard, but mostly because I like the aesthetic and to get the lowest latency from click and keypress to output on the display you’ll want 8K polling rate inputs and 240hz+ monitors. I was somewhat radicalized by reading this blog [1] on Hacker News years ago, and gaming peripherals are largely the way of achieving an extremely smooth desktop experience.
[0] https://www.razer.com/collabs/cinnamoroll?srsltid=AfmBOooMjB... [1] https://danluu.com/input-lag/
A hammer and an oxy-acetylene torch is all that a good mechanic needs.
For free. My main rant about desktop vs server grade motherboards. For a desktop system you really want a desktop grade motherboard. server grade is expensive, takes forever to post, the compute tends toward slow and wide vs desktop's fast and tall, and the parts(ram, cpu) compatability tends to be much more picky. My grip is why is the desktop mb airflow so bad. In a server board everything is aligned front to back. pcie, ram, cpu cooler are all aligned the same way. in a desktop board the pcie goes front to back, the ram goes top to bottom. and toss a coin for which way a cpu cooler will fit.
https://www.asus.com/motherboards-components/motherboards/cs...
I added a Intel Core i7 10700K (with a nice low-profile Noctua cooler/fan) with 32GB of memory and a 512GB SSD and I'm using onboard graphics which is just fine for a daily driver "office" type machine running Linux. Very happy with it.
(It's actually a very nice charger, except for that --ing LED strip).
One is the "when everyone is special, no one is special" factor, but I think that's tempered a bit by PCs becoming a status item (alongside the rise of streaming that shows the streamer and their environment) so it's important the PC is conspicuous. Also for those that have invested significant time/money it has become a point of pride for them that they want to display, and get into flamewars on the internet to defend their team. The manufacturers probably don't mind that it lets them display their brand in lights too and not be hidden away as a sticker or PCB marking.
Also that there seems to be space in the market for 'PC as a pretty lightbox', RGB systems are sophisticated now alongside LCD systems getting attached to various components. The PC becomes a decoration as opposed to a tool that fades into the background like a lot of other devices which are pure display or have enthusiasts salivating about thinner bezels. The thing I find curious is that the lightbox is constrained in the form of a PC (even if they sometimes try hard to hide the machinery of it such as wires or putting components on PCBs hidden behind panels), there's not a lot of consumer products where you could assemble elaborate colored lighting displays.
I don't understand what's happened to PC building since. It's like it's a sport now or something. What's with the RGB crap? I remember wanting my PC to be quiet and out of sight. The screen and speakers were what mattered.
Now everyone's wearing crappy headphones. Everything is about how it looks. :/
But I also had to look past the RGB nonsense. The GPU was basically an accident.
Not by choice, they just came that way and it is unimportant enough that I don't see it as something positive or negative.
I set up everything to a single flat orange-amber hue. I plan to switch everything to a green hue during summer.
It certainly helps to set certain mood.
0. https://web.archive.org/web/20120316141638/http://www.nation...
https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/
It's not looking good, I don't think supply is catching with demand yet.
Though the other day I learned there are many technologies for "RAM", and most of them are garbage for LLMs but still useful for other things, like microcontrollers. So I'm thinking my next "build" is going to be a guitar.
It might also be that NVIDIA is a natural monopoly, while memory manufacturers are a cartel...
The other part of it is that the MSRP already baked in a substantial increase from the previous generation. While RAM was near rock-bottom pricing when this hit, current-gen GPUs definitely were not.
Surely this will be helped by a helium supply shock.
I'm an advocate of sticking a $5 16Gb Optane stick from eBay on a $10 M.2 to PCIe 1x adapter from eBay. Set it up as swap in Windows or Linux. Or pay $200 for a 16GB stick of DDR5.
It will take a couple years. Either AI has to have a big crash or YMTC has to grow their production 3-8x before prices come back down to levels from 12 months ago.
Personally I'm with you (but black), my entire desktop is just one color, and if a component is available in RGB and non-RGB and the difference isn't too big, I pay extra for that non-RGB version (which doesn't make sense it's even the case, but here we are).
I guess you could argue that we're all obsessed with the looks, some that all RAM slots are occupied, some that RGB is everywhere, some that the PC case should be off-white and slowly morph into beige, others that everything should be minimally black.
I don't particularly want to install the bloatware required just to turn off the LEDs, so I've resorted to hiding the PC under a desk at the other side of the room and have long DP and USB cables to the desk where I actually sit. This also has the nice side effect of not being able to hear the fans either!
I'm just too cheap to pay for them though...
I don't see the point though even for a gaming setup, as the fake modules will still reduce airflow.
Also, gaming boards usually have 4 slots (in 2 banks). I would fill at least 2, so I'd rather have a matched kit of 2 modules, and 2 separate fillers, if I did use them.
It is quite common to leave 2 memory slots empty (of RAM) because many boards can't drive the memory at top speed if you use all 4 slots.
https://www.pcgamesn.com/asus-gigabyte-security-flaws-secure...
I do often dress myself up with RGB lights however :)
Isn't 2x8gb faster than 1x16gb since it will run in dual channel?
And shouldn't smaller capacity sticks be cheaper since they can use lower density chips?
Take Epyc processors. On certain ones, after certain RAM amount, populating all the slots causes the cpu to kick the RAM speed to a lower tier.
You’re then limited to capacities of two sticks.
Weird, but it has to do with power requirements. Abutting above the threshold had to be buffered, which increases latency.
Sometimes having more, but slower ram, is still better than having less, but faster ram.
As always, measuring your real world use cases is the ultimate test.
In 2026 the bottleneck is wafer size as fabs are booked out making things for AI.
Or is it just binning by defects, the lower sized parts are just the full size but with defects disabling large chunks of the silicon as I would expect?
Have recent boards/cpus fixed the instability problems people had with 4 sticks of DDR5 yet?
I was shocked when I saw folk saying you can't use 4 slots. It would mean that a one stick build would have an upgrade path but if you started with 2, you'd have to replace them.
There is no sensible reason for the RAM market to be priced the way it is. It's obviously unchecked corruption. There's clearly more value in allowing that corruption than exposing and punishing it.
AI is one of the few major general technological breakthroughs, comparable to the Internet and electricity. It's potentially applicable to everything, which is why right now everyone is trying to apply it to everything. Including developing new optimization algorithms, optimizing optimizing compilers, optimizing applications, optimizing systems, optimizing hardware, ...
Big AI vendors are at the forefront of it, because they're the ones who actually pay for the AI revolution, so any efficiency improvement saves them money.
It will be when it actually exists.
> which is why right now everyone is trying to apply it to everything
And are any of them actually succeeding? Where are the new AI businesses? Where's the new wealth and money? Where's the one guy AI pioneer doing what used to take 100s?
> because they're the ones who actually pay for the AI revolution
Their customers do. The customers are getting ripped off. They want the AI revolution, what they got was a crappy search engine, and copyright whitewashing service instead.
The first electrical motors and lightbulbs absolutely sucked, but the former was still a radical transformation from factories based on a huge steam engine prime mover distributing motive power via belts and pulleys, and the latter was still an improvement over gas lanterns.
The very early internet also sucked, but was nevertheless useful. This was still true even for the very early public web, which was decades later.
The AI which already actually exists is a major general technological breakthroughs, comparable to the Internet and electricity.
Any given AI doesn't need to be superhuman to be comparable.
> And are any of them actually succeeding?
Yup. Old example now, but most physical post (at least in industrialised nations) is now read and sorted by machines which learned to read handwriting as well as printed addresses. ML on handwritten text was basically the "hello world" of AI even 5-10 years back.
And online, spam filtering has always needed help from AI. Before Transformers came along, the state of the art for natural language processing was just counting words in whichever bucket (sales for spam, good-and-bad for sentiment, etc.) and applying Bayesian rules.
This kind of thing was the bread and butter of AI before ChatGPT came along and people forgot AI could be anything beyond a chatbot. Though even as a chatbot, it's a surprisingly effective tool; heck, even as autocomplete it's a surprisingly effective tool, and that's about the weakest thing you can do with it.
> Where are the new AI businesses? Where's the new wealth and money?
Google.
Like, not just today's Google, the original one.
The whole thing about Page Rank is a matrix multiply, and then they added personalisation and ads which uses your every action as signal to optimise a multi-armed-bandit problem. It is, in fact, a machine learning problem; it is AI.
And of course the thing with ads is this argument applies to all ad agencies, so also Facebook. (And not just how Facebook has AI generated scams etc., though even scams are still "where's the money").
Ditto recommendation engines. Both for what news article to read next, what goods Amazon or eBay etc. will suggest, and what shows or clips YouTube etc. will suggest.
And translation. If you forget machine learning and try to write translation software as a traditional piece of software, it will suck: the example I was given when I was young was someone's attempt that ended up with "water sheep" for "hydraulic rams". Google Translate wasn't the first, nor only, tool, but Google did invent the Transformer model specifically for improved translations. And while Google didn't monetise this directly (but did put auto-translation into Chrome and (IIRC) Android apps so perhaps indirectly), some of the other translation companies sure did.
> Where's the one guy AI pioneer doing what used to take 100s?
Depending on what you mean, either "LMGTFY", or "they joined the big companies to do even more because resources", or "the people posting AI-generated projects on Show HN", or "you can sort of see this by looking at employee count and finding the ones with very small head-counts: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/industry/ai "
To combine the examples, here's an AI product originally authored by one person to do translation on OCR'ed text which got bought by big tech: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_Lens
Does me programming my phone into a magic wand from Harry Potter using a single spoken sentence count? Does me talking the phone into becoming a 3-way universal translator from Star Trek count?
In both cases, it's a trivial use of current (as of 6-12 months ago) capabilities of Gemini and ChatGPT, respectively, plus some basic logic. As simple as:
if(someone just said "Lumos") { togglePhoneFlashlight(); }
if($X=what someone just said; IsSpeechInLanguage($X, LangA)) { Speak(Translate($X, LangB)); }
else if(IsSpeechInLanguage($X, LangB)) { Speak(Translate($X, LangA)); }
else { KeepListening(); }
Is this much? Not really, but 5 years ago it would take at least a single engineer and at least a good work day (a conservative estimate) to properly wire all things together and put in a mobile form factor for testing. Today (minus 6-12 months) it took me less than a minute, so that's a 480x improvement right there.
And then I can tell you how last week I had Gemini single-shot me a proper in-browser photo editing tool for autocropping photos of scans (complete with auto-placing non-rectangular quad cropping zone for rotation and perspective correction, snapping sides to edges inside image for minute edits, and host of other trivial editing features). It's impressive it did that at all (even if all the heavy lifting was done by JS version of OpenCV), but it's not the important part. Neither is that result was correct on the first try. No, the important part - the thing that's profound about this technology - is that having AI build such a tool was much, much faster than finding an existing tool for that job.
Building tools to help yourself with your own work isn't a new thing (especially outside of computing). But LLMs are a qualitative change here - they let you wire up bespoke solutions in minutes, that would otherwise take hours or days of fully-focused expert work, which throws xkcd://1205 out the window, as suddenly it makes sense to do that to shave an hour off a two-hour task.
I'm writing a metric ton of Rust code with Claude Code.
I've had this happen both from Amazon and HD/L.
From the read, it seems like… A scam?
I also have a glass panneled side to my computer, but the only RGB on it is on the graphics card waterblock, everything else is just jet black (fans, ZMT water cooling tubing, radiators etc. etc.)
Then, you’re not the target audience.
> Why would I pay for a piece of plastic to fill that slot that doesn't do anything?
It doesn’t do nothing. FTA: “Their sole purpose is cosmetic, though. While they light up and synchronize with your existing RGB ecosystem, they don't contribute to your computer’s memory capacity or performance.”
This is for people with transparent PC cases and memory sticks with RGB LED lighting. For example, see https://v-color.net/collections/prism-pro-rgb-memory-voclor/...:
“RGB SOFTWARE SYNCHRONIZATION SUPPORT
Dynamic RGB lighting control synchronized across main leading M/B such as RGB FUSION, MSI Mystic Light Sync, AURA Sync, POLYCHROME Sync etc. Customize lighting profiles or assign colors to each LEDs to create your own spectacular look.“
RAM has lights ?
wow I've been living in a cave
For example, dust can short out electrical connections. Can enough dust get into an open RAM slot to cause problems?
>Performance RAM + RGB Filler Kit
>Complete RGB Look Instantly
https://www.bestbodyimplants.com/gallery_implants/male-impla...
> Even if your budget only allows you to purchase a single real memory module, you can still achieve the look of a dual-module setup in your build.
> For users aiming for peak performance, a dual-channel memory configuration remains the gold standard. However, with memory prices currently inflated, it’s easy to see the appeal of cost-effective options like V-Color’s 1+1 memory kits.
:-)
Looking forward to the next AI winter.
The AI boom has only just begun. This is literally the next industrial revolution. And it's only now starting to take off.
[edit: 19, article published yesterday]
Of course it isn't normal, that's why I made my comment, to highlight the contrast. And no, my stack is optimized, you have no idea what I'm doing, yet somehow feel confident enough to know what my stack should/shouldn't look like? Man, the hubris of some people...
Next you'd probably tell me my Threadripper 9970X and RTX PRO 6000 is overkill, based on some other unrelated metrics.
Your system sounds great to me, curious what you have going on!
Edit: this is also why some “extreme overclocking”-type motherboards** only have two DIMM slots: having four actively opposes their purpose.
* And yes, loading an XMP/EXPO profile to get the advertised 3000CL60 or w/e counts!
** i.e. https://rog.asus.com/us/motherboards/rog-crosshair/rog-cross...
I mean, it's much cheaper to buy 2x8gb than 1x16gb or even 1x32gb (and 2x8gb is faster than 1x16gb..)
are these people idiots??? ram-slots are computer real-estates