this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2024
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Definitely not the case. You can easily get all-in-one mini PCs for $400-500 that can play most any new game at 1080p without much issue. Thanks to all the new stuff like DLSS/FSR, you can get away with a lot more for a lot less.
Maybe they came back down, but when I looked at parts a year or so ago, the prices were extremely high. Unless you're one of the lucky few who lives anywhere near a Micro Center. There's not even one in my state, so I rely on sites like NewEgg, Amazon, and Best Buy.
I built my first PC for ~$1k in 2017, and it was moderately good. Unless something has changed and I've not noticed, I don't think I could even build that again for that price with the exact same parts.
Or maybe I'm clueless, and you can show me an alternative site that I'm unaware of.
Depends on your target. The integrated GPUs from AMD these days are very good, and can run a lot of games at 720p pretty well. Discrete GPUs have also come down in price over the last year.
What happened was the pandemic created a supply chain bottleneck combined with scalpers gathering up what supply there was. The issues were worked out by the end of that generation, but then Nvidia released the next generation with prices where they assumed people would just pay that now. That's bitten them in the ass, and there's been a lot of market correction as GPUs sit on the shelf (though probably not enough).
As usual, AMD comes out looking like the good guy by being slightly less shitty than its competition. They also had elevated prices this generation, but kept it just a bit lower. Looking good by being a smidge less bad than Intel and Nvidia is a plan that's worked for them 100% of the time every time in the past, so why change it?
I mean, in the graphics department, despite starting out rough, Intel is looking kind of sweet if you tolerate some drivers shennanigans every now and then
Modern games and hardware are expensive, but you can get an absolute slayer of titles from previous years for a steal. You won't run new games at the bleeding edge of graphics, but you don't need to.
Yeah, I know that. I'm a very patient gamer, but my comment is referring to the cost of hardware. That can be somewhat offset by the lower cost of games, but you're not getting as much bang for your buck by building your own PC as you would have had in the past. Not even close!
Add to that the fact that game sales and discounts are nowhere near what they once were and that things like HumbleBundle have taken a nosedive, and it's very much a rich person's plaything, in comparison to what it was in the past. Even used gear is going for more than what one would expect.
I agree with your tips, though.
Yeah, prices went super high during the pandemic, and prices for GPUs in particular stayed high for a while due to crypto miners. They're largely back down to earth now, though.
That's good news! They were still high last I checked, but it's been a while since I've even thought about upgrading anything.