Technology

So do we expect the cost of gpu's to also rise due to this? Some money is opening up and next year I wanted to upgrade anyway. Might just need to buy it earlier

DDR4 is serviceable to me.

Here's some actual advice for PC builders - what do you actually want from your system? Nothing you say can be vague, you have to set up goals. That's the entire important note of PC building is what you're building it for and how long you want it to last for as in, how long until you're wanting to build another?

As (relatively) old as they are, midrange Core i5 chips from Intel’s 12th-, 13th-, and 14th-generation Core CPU lineups are still solid choices for budget-to-midrange PC builds.

I would be hesitant about obtaining secondhand 13th or 14th gen desktop Intel CPUs, since those are the ones that destroy themselves over time. There is no way to know whether they've been run on non-updated BIOSes and damaged themselves. I burned through an i9-13900 and an i9-14900 myself. Started with occasional errors and gradually got worse until they couldn't even get through boot. I am sure that there are lots of people trying to unload damaged processors (knowingly or unknowingly) that have only seen the early stages of damage.

12th-gen CPUs are safe.

Consider pre-built systems. A quick glance at Dell’s Alienware lineup and Lenovo’s Legion lineup makes it clear that these towers still aren’t particularly price-competitive with similarly specced self-built PCs. This was true before there was a RAM shortage, and it’s true now. But for certain kinds of PCs, particularly budget PCs, it can still make more sense to buy than to build.

I just picked up two Alienware PCs for relatives to take advantage of this window, but it was only something like a two-week window, where Dell announced at the beginning of December that they were doing price increases to reflect the RAM shortage mid-December. I believe that that window is closed now (or, well, it might still be cheaper to get DIMMs with a PC than separate, but not to get memory that way at pre-memory-shortage prices any more).

EDIT: From memory, Lenovo announced that they were doing their RAM-induced price increases at the beginning of January, so for Lenovo, it might still work for another week-and-a-half or so.

EDIT2: 15th gen Intel CPUs are also safe WRT damage, but like AMD's AM5-socket processors, they can't use DDR4 memory, which is what the author is trying to find a route to do.

Why do you need a computer? Here is the AI on your smartphone, enjoy!

I guess my 96GB of RAM from 3 years ago will still hold up for another decade.

I waited too long to buy a new PC. I thought the later, the better. And now this.

Well, Windows 10 support runs until October 2026.

Not a hardware fix, but there's memory compression. It sounds like Windows 11 defaults to having memory compression on:

https://www.xda-developers.com/little-known-windows-feature-hurting-your-pcs-performance-heres-how-can-disable-it/

Linux has zswap and zram to do memory compression, which I've mentioned here recently. I don't know of any distros that turn it on by default. It sounds from recent reading like for modern systems with SSD swap, zswap is probably preferable to zram.