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.
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 part of your PC died?
Motherboard. New motherboard…so new cpu socket (mine was Broadwell)…and new ram needed.
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.
So, you have DDR4?
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.
This is essentially what I did and it worked a treat. Get in while the getting's still good. Having a modern but DDR4 compatible system is not obly a great way to get up and running now, but will help see you through this crisis long term.
Why don't you just get a MB only for now? What mandates an entire new batch of hardware?
It sounds like whining for the sake of it really.
I've been in the same boat since it seems something about the memory controller on my gaming PC's MB is broken, but price wise it feels like it just doesn't make sense. I could get something from eBay relatively cheap but then I'd probably spend an hour disassembling and reassembling just to maybe learn that the eBay unit has some equivalent issue or is slightly broken in some other way. I could old new stock for outrageous prices. Right now I'd rather just wait until either an upgrade would be REALLY worth it or at least prices come down.
I’ve been pricing out my various options but the notion of replacing a 10 year old motherboard with another 10 year old motherboard is kinda lousy.
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.
Buying a cheap secondhand motherboard is still less lousy than losing access to a game collection. I did that with a 13 years old computer and it cost 50€.
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)
10 year old is still DDR4, and ddr4 is still plenty fine for gaming workloads. AM4 still has some solid options out there, the 5800x3d has 3d vcache and would be an insane upgrade over any… quad core? 6th gen intel? Not sure what the AMD at the time was. 14th gen intel supports both ddr4/5 if you wanted the ram upgrade potential, but it… well, I remember it being pretty sketchy perf/degradation wise for a while, so maybe don’t go with them. I understand the sucky feeling that you’re sidegrading instead of investing in a new beastly rig for a reasonable price- believe me I’ve been in the same boat since all this GPU bullshit started. I got lucky choosing to upgrade to ddr5 years ago, but I elected not to get a GPU out of a lack of clairvoyance :(. Still though- I upgraded from an i7 6700k in 2023. The 5800x3d released a year prior to the CPU I picked up. Granted I went to zen 5, but holy shit I didn’t not realize how fucking old that 6700k was haha. The 3dvcache on AMD CPUs is a crazy, crazy boost- in addition to the fact that modern CPUs are already bounds and leagues ahead of 2016, and I would go to bet that even if it’s technically a sidegrade, you probably wouldn’t feel too horrible about the money spent. (I really want to say that you’d feel pretty satisfied with it it, but I can’t discount that I also jumped up to a higher tier zen 5 cpu, and don’t have explicit experience with the 5800x or other AM4 stuff. ymmv!)
If it hadn't died, you'd still be running it.
Oh I agree, I am just saying that if you really did not want to spend, there are obviously options. I am thinking of promoting my super old and long-time-not-used PC with an i7-3770 and 32GB DDR3 RAM to a server and I bought a ~$45 motherboard for it some months ago, now I have to bother finding it a good NAS case and buy at least two HDDs (the real cost here).
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.
can't you just buy a used same class motherboard from a marketplace?
How does the steam machine compare to building your own?
Building your own is cheaper, although not by a ton. Valve isn't taking a loss on them.
Yeah, just barely, and only if you don't value warranty or build time. I'm also not super sure you could get something together that is somewhat compact like the steam machine and still be cheaper.
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...)
There's always the BC 250 route. Takes some work but seems cool.
Use the money to short the market because it’s probably a top signal of some sort.