SpaceSimCentral

Seen the crazy prices for ddr4 which have double since the start of the year and the absolutely insane price of ddr5. Now with the announcement of one the three major makers of ram, adandoning the consumer market is anything witch uses memory about to take a price hike.

Kind of hoping my computer lasts at least five more years 

I was thinking about building a new am5 system but with crazy prices for ram it has gone out the window and I will stick to just upgrading the current one

@pinback I upgraded to an AMD 5800X and a nVidia 4070, and 32GB a couple of years ago. Upgrading to a new AM5 platform would offer me an 15% to 20% increase in framerate, in 1080p!! Less for higher resolution gaming!! (In reality I still use an 60Hz 1080p TV for monitor, so I think anything higher of 60FPS is wasted).
 
Check this:


If you are still on AM4, just upgrade to an 57003D/58003D (best bang for the buck CPU, and quite cheap) and a new GPU! There are still good bargains to be found!! 

I recently wanted to add more memory to my PC and looked back at my PC build on NewEgg and wow I was shocked at the prices of HDD and Memory, I think I paid about $215 for the Memory and $170 for the HDD back in 2023, now look this is today:

This craziness will kill PC gaming as it has been upto now. However, I see a future growing interest in retro gaming with older hardware running older games.

Pinback wrote: Fri Dec 19, 2025 9:53 am I was thinking about building a new am5 system but with crazy prices for ram it has gone out the window and I will stick to just upgrading the current one

I fear you missed the boat with a AM5 based system. It's not impossible to find deals, but it will be very difficult. Some savings to be had buying refubs or 2nd hand, but you run the risk of fakes or buying something that is worn out. The worst of it is, we don't even know if or when things might come back to what they were. These tech corporations have insatiable greed, they only go where the money is and right now that is AI farms. They couldn't care less about the home users.

I moved to linux almost 9mos ago and I have been happy. I haven't run into a steam game I haven't been able to get running on my machine. Looking at my cpu/mem my OS consumes a lot less memory (and OS only consumes like 2.5gb HDD). System been rock solid stable and I really do think my frame rates are on par with the windows experience I had but my CPU/Mem resources used during that playtime is lower.

I see on youtube I get a lot of switch to Linux videos With Steam Deck doing well (and its linux based) these older PCs we all have can last much longer and may not need the hardware upgrades with a lower demanding OS.

Example I have Avorion, X Rebirth, Watch Dogs 2, Starpoint Gemini Warlords, Starsector, Elite Dangerous, Wasteland 2, Kenshi, Valheim, Where Winds Meet (and more) on my machine and they work flawlessly.

So for those with aging hardware, build a bootable Linux USB and just give it a spin. Might help get through this hardware winter....

There has been videos saying we might get a surge of ram hitting the market soon, because the AI demand is cooling down. I would love this news if it happens I wanted to add another 64GB to my system to assist with running local AI LLMs.

I remained on Win11, BUT I installed the Pro version with rufus so, no online microsoft account requirement, and used flyoobee to get rid of everything about telemetry and co-pilot!!!

My system now is far more responsive than win10!!!

And I have installed bazzite on my Legion Go.