My own PC died and now I’m locked out of my entire Steam library for the foreseeable future. A $2000 PC is literally a downgrade from what I bought 10 freaking years ago.
What the freaking hell.
What the freaking hell.
GPU is mostly fine and can probably reuse that but it’s Vega so not the greatest I was due for an upgrade but the prices of everything is ridiculous.
The thought of pc-of-Theseus’ing my busted ass PC is just sad.
Thank god I bought a PS5 Pro before Sony started jacking up the prices.
I remember when buying a $300 GPU was extravagant and gave you state of the art graphics.
The PC I replaced when I bought this one was such a huge improvement.
My options basically boils down to fixing trash that’s falling apart or a sidegrade at best for the same price as what I bought a beast of a PC for 10 freaking years ago. Depressing.
Point is, quite a lot of hardware can still do a lot. I have a Ryzen 5500U-based laptop that still outperforms the PCs of most people that I know (non-tech people).
Though in my case I feel like I have to get a loan to buy a workstation + an actual gaming PC for my wife. That all is beginning to look like at least $15k... yikes. But I am not sure I can wait until 2028 to see if things _start_ normalizing... Depressing indeed.
I agree that the current situation sucks, but I don't think one can say it locks someone on your situation out of your game collection.
(edit: misremembered, $2000 is not the price of the game collection)
It wasn't the same model or vendor MB but it was a compatible one. Same chipset.
That's actually not bad, last time I checked the only ones that were in stock cost 300+ (IIRC all x570). My plan then was to maybe get a new case and rebuild it on a micro ATX board which are generally more available and seem to have a few decent options in the ~80 price range.
Anyway, again it's a question of is it worth it spending several hundred and the time it takes to rebuild. It currently "works" fine except it takes 5 minutes to boot and is unable to save any BIOS settings like XMP, fan curves, and so on (and yes I changed the CMOS battery - there's a long thread on the ASRock forums of others having the same issue even after the battery is swapped). The non-optimal settings probably eat a few % of performance but other than that it's mostly annoyance, so it still feels like if I'm going to invest any more in it, it better be more worth it
Pick any B550 with a VRM heatsink for $90, a 5600 for $190, and you are back in business.
Get a 5070 or 9070 before GDDR supply is completely gone if you want an actual upgrade.
As for GPU price, that Vega 64 was $500 in 2018. Even a midrange GPU hasn't been $300 since the Radeon RX 480 launched a decade ago.
Same I just built a dual Broadwell Xeon E5 server / NAS. Why? Because someone local was selling a cheap Chinese X99 motherboard, two Xeons, and 64GB of DDR4 RAM for $150 CAD. The deal was too good. So I built a machine around it. (Though what I should have done was shove it into an old Dell T630/730, and saved myself some hassle.)
Now is the time of re-using old tech.
Could be less than $100 if buying used too maybe!
I've built two PCs in the last 5 years and both have had parts that were broken from the factory... There is something to be said about being able to hand off troubleshooting and replacement. I had ASRock pointing fingers at everything else to the point where I had swapped out CPU, PSU, and RAM, until they relented and replaced the motherboard (the replacement which is broken again now 5 years later by the way...)
Do you trust the brand and models of the gear you're buying? Use Newegg for reviews even if you buy from Amazon?
Though if a component dies due to ESD from an imperceptible spark then the manufacturer skimped on ESD testing
Steam Machine can't be upgraded.
Once SM becomes too slow for gaming it will become mostly useless as it lacks necessary ports to be repurposed into a reasonable home server. I always reuse my old PC parts as home server upgrades.
Steam Machine uses a proprietary fan that will be annoying or even impossible to replace 5 years from now.
- 2x the GPU for about the same price.
- Same power usage while in sleep.
- HDMI CEC with a dongle.
- Wake up from sleep with controller if using official Steam Controller.
- Cool and quiet operation. You can actually beat Steam Machine at noise levels under load.
- Upgradability.
- Standard parts that are easy to service and replace.
What you can't get with a custom PC is:
- Comparable size.
- Comparable support (software/firmware fixes and good warranty/service).
- Cool led strip unless you're into electronics and can make your own from scratch.
That finally starts to ease pressure... then the AI RAM boom happens and now I can't even buy memory for anything I've got and I'm trapped in 8GB baseline RAM hell.
Every plan I had to update my network, my home, all out the window. I haven't seen my Steam library in at least a year or two now.
Too high latency for Clair Obscura (and obviously Dark Souls) level reaction time. Though surprisingly passable for most FPS (I just played "Ready or Not" on it yesterday, and it was acceptable).