Submitted 1 day ago by Grumpy404@lemmy.zip to [deleted]
Just wondering as computers are sorta my hobby and i like messing around with different ones. I havent in a while due to prices going up such as with ram usually. I dont mess with new tech, but i want to know what you guys do with the crazy prices out there? or are you already set before prices went up? Or are you just lucky in some form?
Just curious.
I realized I don’t need new tech, I find more joy in repairing and using what I can find second hand.
I tried to do all of my tech purchasing for the foreseeable future shortly after Trump was reelected, based on the assumption that he was going to fuck the economy. Gotta admit I thought the high prices would come from idiotic tariffs instead of idiotic AI, but whatever…
Thats exactly how I came to rebuild my PC. I hate the piece of shit, but I have to thank him for scaring me into building when I did because of the threat of tarrifs. My 64GB of ram was like $200 not the absolutely fucking disgustingly insane $1k or whatever it is now…
If I had known it was gonna get this bad I would’ve gone for a new motherboard with a 9800X3D and DDR5 in my desktop, instead of keeping my existing one and upgrading to a 5700X3D and 64GB of DDR4. Also, I might have gotten a 7900XTX instead of a 9070XT (they were roughly the same price at the time, but the 7900XTX is double the price now).
I would have pulled the trigger on the minipc NAS I was thinking about, as I literally had it and a bunch of SSDs in my Amazon cart but was waffling about it when the prices started skyrocketing.
I might have even bought one of those “strix halo” PCs with the 128GB of unified memory back when they were $2000 instead of $4000+.
I work in IT and have admittedly taken some systems we’ve set for recycling to fill gaps or help people out.
Been in IT for 25 years. This is the greatest perk.
I worked for a hospitality company, fortune 500, who had acquired us and had never had an IT department before.
I still have boxes of Cat5e from the wifi installations, who said to pitch the cable into the trash.
I also harvested a switch with just one bad port (48 port cisco catalyst) and when they decided to upgrade the call center with new PCs and were throwing away the old pizza boxes, we were all stuff our cars. I built a cluster, just because, but then started reinstalling Winders XP on them and giving them to friends, family, or selling them dirt cheap to acquaintances.
Yeah from a business perspective replacing hardware makes Load of sense but it’s not always because it’s problematic. We try to donate most of the systems we replace except for the hard drives. I’ve just shifted where the donations occurs a few times when needed.
Any half rate cook can make top tier ingredients taste good.
A true master chef can create culinary delights from scraps.
Everybody laughed at me when I took a 10-port USB hub, installed a flash drive in every one, and set it up as a RAID array.
Today? With storage prices where they’re at? Think they’re still laughing?
Yes. They’re still laughing at me.
can your next project be to get one of those old multi-disc CD changers, install a rw drive in it and see if you can make a raid array work with it?
This rules lmao
Make a stew with RAM sticks, got it.
Stew? Are you mad? That’s ridiculous.
RAM sticks are for nachos.
I have just focused on enjoying what I have for now, mostly.
I built desktops for my wife and myself back in 2013 and 2014. Back then I fresh out of college and we were poor, but I had experience building PC’s in high school. So I was able to use those skills to find deals and be efficient so it was a great investment in dollars per hours of entertainment. And over the years I slowly upgraded them- mostly the storage, adding SSD’s as boot drives and bigger HDD’s for storage. I started using integrated graphics for my own, then bought a used 270X a couple of years later.
Something in mine broke in 2019. Either the CPU or motherboard, but at that point both were ancient and it wasn’t worth trying to buy parts to try to troubleshoot, so I built myself a new PC. In 2020, I started building my wife a similar one, accelerating my purchases when I started to see reports of factories shutting down from sone mysterious flu-like illness that was hitting China and Taiwan hard. I couldn’t afford high-end stuff, so we both had an RX580. I have a 2600x, and my wife has a 3600, so basically the same thing. We were really lucky to get such relatively decent hardware before the crypto boom and pandemic led to GPU prices skyrocketing. Those rx580’s were each less than $200, and for 1080p are still a WAY better FPS/$ than anything new on the market today.
I have been keeping an eye on the market and waiting, hoping for GPU’s to come back down to more reasonable levels. I probably would have bought a 9070XT, or maybe even a 9070, if I could have found one at MSRP. Despite AMD’s promises those MSRP’s were completely divorced fron reality: there was simply not enough supply to support those prices. So i’m still rocking those RX580’s.
When I built my wife’s PC in 2020, her old one still worked and I still had a bunch of good parts from mine which broke in 2019. I waa interested in learning about Linux so I cobbled those parts to make a machine with an AMD 8 Core Bulldozer CPU, my RX270X (my wife had an NVIDIA GTX660 which maybe had slightly better performance on paper, but NVIDIA drivers gave me issues with Linux so I switched), and 16GB of DDR3. I installed Cinnamon Mint and fell in love. It was so much more customizeable, so much more stable, so much better performance than Windows was on the same hardware. Felt like breathing new life into old hardware, and i was able to stream games from my new Windows desktop in my office to this Linux machine in my basement. Linux works a lot better with my Behringer audio interface, and this allowed me to have a workflow where I record in my basement where my musical equipment is, then do the rest of the production on my Windows machine because my DAW is not Linux a compatible and my office is more comfortable to be in.
Separate from that, I wanted to dabble with pi-hole so I picked up an OrangePi Zero 2 for $35. At this point Raspberry Pi’s were ridiculously overpriced (as they still are) for what they are, but at least knock offs like tbe OrangePi were still cheap at the time. I always intended to do more with it, but I’ve never gotten around to it.
So at that point I could game in my office and my basement. My living room was annoying. At times my wife had her PC there, and it was a pain. Wires were messy. She somehow broke a ton of wireless mice/keyboards. The noise from her fans was annoying. The scaling was bad. So I moved her desktop to our office (and built a custom megadesk for both of us out of wood) and bought an NVIDIA Shield Pro for our living room. It was way better than the built-in Roku for streaming video, and I was able to stream there from either of our desktops for gaming. Being always-on, low power, with a bit of storage from a USB drive meant it was kind of a rudimentary NAS too. With SyncThing I was able to use the Shield to do stuff like backup the memes from our phones and keep an organized collection of our desktop and mobile wallpapers. I also got into emulation, and basically turned the Shield into a personal Cloud Save solution for my emulators across devices.
i haven’t bought new hardwares for a long time. it’s mostly all older used items, sometimes even straight out of garbage bin.
the newest machine i have is from 2021.
Same, this race for performance it annoying. My $150 computer is a billion times faster than the one I had in the 90s, I can use it to program, work, and even play most Steam games.
Good time to check the backlog of older games in your library and just be ok with the reality that your main pc can’t run modern games anymore. Also I turned 2 of my older pc’s to linux machines. Ubuntu lts (12gb ram minipc) and mint cinnamon (4gb ram laptop). Those old machines just got a new life and can still run renpy engine games or rpg makes games etc.
I’m doing stupid bullshit with $4 microcontrollers instead of doing stupid bullshit with bigger machines.
Buying second hand.
I don’t need the latest CPU generation or largest ram sticks for my minipc for self hosting.
I have been waiting “for prices to go back to normal” to get a new video card since 2018.
I pivoted to peripherals. My mouse, for example, has exactly 4 original parts left, everything but the shell, PCB, and side button switches are aftermarket. My headset has aftermarket cushions, and EQ profiles for specific genres of games and music. I’ve started learning about CPU and RAM clocks. Basically, modify/tune what you have, don’t buy new stuff.
I scavenge old hardware from work. My rack is now com0lete (hardware wise, at least), as I powered up the JBOD cabinet today, consisting of a bunch of harddrives left over from disk upgrades at work. It’s a bunch of 10TB and 3TB SAS drive. That server used to be an automation controller, now it’s my storage server. I had 160G of DDR3 RAM laying around from a machine I retired a while back, which is nice to have with ZFS.
My VPN concentrator was a datalogger for two industry robots.
My web crawler was supposed to be a test-server for the software department, but they needed to upgrade.
The only new hardware is my game server, and RAM was over half the price.
My networking hardware is also from work, as I detest consumer grade networking hardware.
It’s not worth the downsides, but a major upside of working for a large tech outlet is getting to pick over the massive amount of tech refuse they cycle through. Being able to snag 2-3 year old pro equipment for free is an undeniably tempting perk.
I always had a good machine. As I’m not a gamer or slopmaker, I don’t need crazy amounts of ram or fat GPUs. I just wait until the LLM shit crashes, and will buy a new machine after that.
Mechanic’s car trope: they’re outdated rustbuckets and often half broken 🥲
So much this! I know the abilities and quirks of my software and hardware, and I get excellent use out of discarded junk.
I took up blacksmithing.
I etch my own silicon wafers. I’ve perfected the 4mm chip.
I mainly only buy old (like, over a decade old) laptops off eBay so I’m not affected. I’m not replacing any parts of my main PC till they break. I think the current culture of upgrading just to stay up to date rather than because something doesn’t work anymore is incredibly wasteful, especially given the emissions and human rights abuses in the manufacture of PC parts.
Totally agree. I have an inexpensive computer I built for about $500 in 2018. I haven’t upgraded a single component since then, and most of them were the cheapest components I could get.
To date there has been one (1) new game I wanted to play that it wouldn’t run. Reading comments like “oh you won’t be able to play modern games on an old computer” like. But I am able to. I don’t understand what other people need to upgrade all the time, the pace of advancement in components has really slowed down since the 90’s/00’s.
I’m just using my stuff longer
On pause
I’m waiting for China to try and capture the market with cheap subsidized hardware.
I’ll run what I have until then (steamdeck and 8gb of VRAM in a laptop). I’m not happy with it and would be upgrading, but at this point it feels like I’m being insulted so I’m hoping I can eventually boycott most of the current big players.
Some things, like displays or audio equipment, haven’t inflated too drastically.
I’m thinking about getting a mirrorless camera for an upcoming vacation some family is taking me on. Those are inflating some, but the used market is healthy.
I did happen to FOMO buy some RAM and SSD before the apocalypse though. I didn’t think it would be this bad, but I got a funny feeling watching the news. I guess that counts as being “lucky.”
I switched to Linux. And use a middle tier laptop. I settled for not having the fastest laptop. Gaming laptops run to hot and cost twice as much. I usually play indie and older games. My current setup can okay RDR2, but who has time for that? I currently have a Acer with Radeon chipset from last year. It’s a was a no fuss install with Linux that just works. I like Intel and Nvidia, but Intel is slower for the money and Nvidia doesn’t work as well on Linux. Other than the latest games, I can do about anything I want. Recently I designed something in Blender.
I still have a few older sticks of DDR4 from various older projects, and AM4 boards and CPUs are still decently priced… at least relative to newer stuff. In any case, most games aren’t going to need DDR5 for a long time, and so long as you aren’t bothering with ray tracing to any significant degree older GPUs are still competitive. The only thing that’s required these days is an SSD, and it’s not as though those haven’t been around forever at this point.
It sucks yeah, not being able to even consider newer parts, but it is what it is.
I built my gaming/media rig before covid. it’s still running strong. My 2 laptops were work laptops that were going to be tossed so I took them home, installed linux mint and they work perfectly fine. I’ve been in IT for over 20 years so I’m fine with older tech. I don’t need new and shiny.
I haven’t bought anything new. I want to get a laptop and switch to that as my main PC (so beefy enough graphics card both for gaming and video editing) and also because I want to move countries in the near future, however nothin’ doin’ right now. I would potentially be open to certified used, but not sure on that one in Japan for something I want.
The drives for my media server are recertified enterprise grade 16tb instead of brand new consumer 8tb. doubled the capacity for like only 20% above what consumer is selling for. RAM screwed me tho. Couldn’t find a way around that one.
Agreed! If you can afford the nicer SAS MoBo or back planes, definitely will outlast consumer drives even though they’re used.
I’ve got 6x 3TB drives from 2014 still going in raid 10, 10x 8TB from 2019 in raid 5, and 8x 16TB drives in raid 5 from 2022 that I bought last year. So happy I spent the cash, though reluctant at the time, thrilled now!
I have a semi decent desktop 12600K, 32gb ram, 4080 with lots of storage. I bought a new Framework FW13 laptop 18 months ago. On the computer side, I think I can ride this out.
However, My phone is on the fritz so I’m gonna have to shell out for a new one soon.
Apart from a new phone, I will just ride this out.
New phone, or “new” phone?
I buy used 2-year-old flagship phones, about every 2 or 3 years, and pay like $200 instead of $1000.
Used enterprise gear is a hell of a deal. I spent roughly 3-4 hundred dollars on a 17 inch laptop with a xeon processor and an RTX 4000 (no, not the gaming kind of gpu).
I upgraded a year ago so I’m fine on RAM. When I needed extra storage I just bought the disks. It’s more expensive but not something I can’t afford.
micgerne@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
I’m just not buying anything new. I need more drive space, but with current prices I’m deleting stuff rather than expanding my storage.
yaroto98@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I’ve been messing around in the esp32 space. I cheated and bought a bunch of pieces off m5stack. It’s been fun!