themachinestopsThe dominoes are falling: motherboard sales down 50% as PC enthusiasts are put off by stinking memory prices
Makes sense. CPU/Mobo/RAM typically go together in a rebuild. Storage, case, PSU, perepherals, GPU can often carry over between builds as they’re all pretty backwards compatible.
Yeah. This makes pretty good sense. Make some ram and SSDs - lowee the price - and I’m sure Motherboard sales will go up.
It’s funny how people don’t want to buy motherboards without anything else
I only change motherboards when moving up to the next RAM format or CPU chipset. I stick with AMD due to cost and low thermals, and while their CPU generations shared the same interface I had one mobo for DDR3, one for DDR4, etc.
Can’t wrap my head around constantly upgrading the mobo to be honest. Sure, they have lots of features but I haven’t seen a situation where a mobo would be an upgrade worth doing without also upgrading everything else.
The only time I’ve ever done that is during an upgrade chain that results in a motherboard not fitting into the case I need it to. Even then, the last one I bought was from a local used parts shop since I had an Intel 4670k I wanted to slap into a server.
I still got a 4670k in my server. Thought of upgrading in Q1. I can forget all about that now… Unfortunately my mobo is slowly dying, so there’s a limit on how long I can push it.
JohnEdwaJust use an Intel CPU and you’ll understand, as they seem to invent a new incompatible CPU socket every five minutes.
That is part of why I have avoided them, far easier to mix and match AMD stuff to meet my price points since their sockets stick around so long!
Each PC lasts me at least 5 years. I am three or so years on my 5800x3d with a 7090XT I picked up last year and the whole setup will probably still be rocking games past 2030.
eletesHow often do you upgrade your computer? I do the same but without really trying, it’s literally the case that by the time I start to feel I need a new pc there is already a new CPU socket, often several, and new ram format. I’ve almost never been able to actually reuse stuff. I imagine the only scenario where I could do that would be if some component straight up broke
Maybe every 5 or so years, and generally there has been something worth upgrading the mobo for like new connections for storage. So far it has been when it struggled with 75+ FPS in games that I care about at the settings I want.
Since it is so spread out I can’t say it is a solid pattern, but so far each CPU and mobo upgrade have been together with a new set of RAM and occasionally I get extra RAM in between. Hard drives/SSDs and GPUs are whenever but generally they are years apart too.
because youd only swap mobos for either aesthetics(expensive, not often done), or because you need more pci-e I/O.
the average user doesn’t use all their pci-e i/o, and the ones that do, are looking towards workstation motherboards, which is almost a completely different market from the consumer level stuff. It’s a game of, you know when you need more i/o, and if you needed it, you probably would have never bought the consumer level board in the first place.
underiskwhat if we cannibalize our long-term viability for a short-term gain says every dipshit in charge of tech hardware manufacturing.
you know when the bubble pops and they no longer have AI companies buying RAM they will switch back to consumers and keep the high prices.
if they’re still around when the financial shell game they’re playing finally comes to a stop. who am i kidding the government will bail them out.
if the US government were actually funded by taxes, everything the government does would be with “my money”
Even if the government is funded by money printed by the central bank, it would still be funded with “your money”. Every dollar printed dilutes your money by that same amount, ie it’s like a much more subtle tax that doesn’t follow any of the principles of proportionality, everyone pays the same (except those with little to no liquidity and everything invested, so it’s really a tax on the poor through inflation)
mesaProfits for me, losses for thee
Absolutely
☂️-Keeping prices above what people are willing to buy for, while the majority of their business goes bust, is not a recipe to stay in business.
But consumers are stupid. when they start selling ram again at a high price we should all boycot buying computers. instead a lot of people will just accept the new price. we saw it after the pandemic, people just accepting prices instead of holding fast and forcing prices down.
You’re saying this as a comment on an article about how drastically sales have already dropped due to the price increases…
I am talking about when the price is no longer based supply. When we see their market bottom out on AI one would expect to see the price drop. But looking at recent history these massive companies keep the price high because consumers see it as the new normal.
Consumers will find a way to eventually afford this price bump when its not food, shelter or medical care. It just takes a little longer when it is not a necessity.
Every business is doing this for everything. To different degrees but they are all chasing their “get our fortune now and get the fuck out because the sky is falling” mentality. Have been since Trump 1.0 and now it’s accelerating rapidly.
SportsRulesOpinionsYou have to remember that “get that bag” is practically inherit to business. We spend a lot of time and effort making it illegal to fuck people over and do bad business stuff, but kinda-sorta since Regan the businesses have slowly been winning that battle.
Also your reputation. I had a Crucial SSD and was days from getting an identical one as a backup but then they said they were stopping consumer RAM sales so they’re now on my blacklist.
Question is, though, who now isn’t on your blacklist?
Samsung and SK Hynix never sold to consumers directly, yet seem to be avoiding flak.
Who do you get that isn’t that three? Almost all RAM on the market is Samsung, SK Hynix, or Micron.
That’s every company, most upper management don’t stay in one position for more than 2 years. So the system is setup for short term gains because investors aren’t interested in long term investments and the blowback is the next guys problem. Who then is looking for the next big win to cover up the last guy issues without fixing anything. Then they bring in someone to clean up the mess and the cycle starts again.
Plus most consumers have short memories or don’t have an alternative so their stuck. There are small groups holding on but for 75% of the world’s population right now it’s Android or iOS, AMD or Intel, AMD or NVIDIA, Samsung or WD or Seagate or SanDisk, Att or Verizon, Apple or Microsoft, and so on.
That’s every company
Not every company, just most. Privately owned corporations aren’t legally obligated to kill long-term viability for short-term gaing like publicly traded companies are.
Many owners of privately owned corps are that dumb, but not all of them
aren’t legally obligated to kill long-term viability for short-term gaing like publicly traded companies are.
Public companies are not obligated to do this. This is caused by the stock options that CEOs/other upper management gets. They want to maximize their gains on their could of years they serve before jumping ship to the next company.
False. There’s a thing called fiduciary duty where companies are obligated to make profitable decisions for their shareholders. If they don’t prioritize short term gains they’re opened up to lawsuits from investors
Fiduciary duty does not require they tank long term profitability for short term gains. That’s an idiotic believe you have.
Wonder if we’ll getting consumer grade SoCs that are CPUs with integrated RAM.
We’ll be getting the opportunity to rent low-powered cloud computers at premium prices, and if you want to keep your data that costs extra.
“You’ll own nothing and like it.”
BurgerBaronIf things get that bad, I’ll just have to change my hobbies up and ditch tech as much as I can.
Strix Halo (AI Max CPUs) are basically that.
But they’re still DDR5 hanging off a bus, manufactured in the same place as sticks, so that wouldn’t really affect the price.
I dont know enough about the hardware details of DDR5 admittedly. But it doesn’t seem improbable to architect x86_64 cpus to include a set amount.
Yeah, you lose the ability to upgrade it, but you gain guaranteed compatibility, one less component to damage and troubleshoot. People don’t seem to complain about the integrated RAM in ARM processors .
CPU makers can’t really make system memory affordably, unfortunately. That’s why it’s separate in the first place :(
Intel has actually done this in the past, with a little eDRAM cache for their integrated graphics on some older 5000 series CPUs, like the 5775C. It topped out at 128MB.
AMD already does something similar with their X3D CPUs, albeit with SRAM… it tops out at 64MB.
They will sell you a bigger version, with IIRC 768MB of L3 memory, for many thousands of dollars.
Another issue is that CPU designs take many, many years to go from initial idea to manufacturing, along with truckloads of cash. So they couldn’t even respond to this shortage in 2026 if they wanted to.
Another is that AMD outsources their manufacturing anyway, though not Intel.
Does China not have any companies that can make RAM? Seems like an opportunity to grab some market share. But maybe they don’t, or maybe they’d prefer to sell it to AI companies too.
xepWhy would a Chinese for-profit corporation differ from any other? Except for the Chinese ones having backing from a garbage authoritarian empire. Maybe they can get free slaves from the state?
Because the Chinese government controls Chinese companies whereas the American government just lets companies do whatever the hell they want.
The only rich country with actual legal slavery is the US.
CMXT has ddr5 manufacturing capabilities but it will be years before they scale it, and they’re embargoed by the US, so nobody on good terms with the US can get it.
And yes, they would also sell to the enterprise customers, but it would lower prices overall.
tabularWelp, sucks to be a motherboard manufacturer. Always getting dragged along by other component manufacturers.
They had a little bit of reprise with the surge of SFF PCs but not much.
Small form factor, or something like that . Little motherboard possibly fanless, space for one or maybe 2 2.5 hd. The little thing you can use for a nice video player at home or the cash register at work