But why did my millenial heart immediately think of Dance Dance Revolution???
My take : Prices got you down ? Keep the hardware you already have ! No one else can upgrade anyway, games requirements aren’t going up anytime soon.
Obviously that doesn’t cover you if you don’t already have a machine, in which case I would go DDR3.
But for those who do, does anyone upgrade anymore ? I’m on 2019 hardware and everything runs perfectly good. Oftentimes great !
Also using 2019 hardware! I dread the day something dies, though. Luckily I upgraded to 32gb of RAM the last time it was super cheap. I’m hoping this machine has another ten years in it.
I bought a new video card right after Trump won. But yeah now I’m ready to use my current hardware for a good long while.
I love how “After Trump won” is a legit basepoint when everything went to shit, even if unrelated (AI was going to happen regardless of politics)
Yeah you had a brief window to prepare for things getting really bad.
100%. I did get a 32gb mini pc this summer. win 11 is not as stable as win 10 on ddr3, mostly sleep/monitor issues. and 780m on ddr5 is about the same for gaming as 1660s on ddr3. Don’t chase gaming frame rates until prices get more reasonable. If you somehow don’t have a PC more recent than ddr3, then it’s not time to get into gaming, but upgrading cpu/gpu and an extra 16gb ram is likely the better value compared to new system.
I retire PCs at the college I work at. They get stacked in the basement waiting on an inventory/recycling procedure that will never happen because we’re a satellite campus and the basement is the tomb of technology. Went down there the other day to bring a retired PC up to replace a very old lab PC that died. The HD had been removed by a colleague - fine, that’s procedure - and then I realized all the RAM had been stripped out. Dozens and dozens of PCs with nary a stick. “If you’re selling that RAM, I want in on it” I told him. He laughed nervously and said no, but wouldn’t say where it all was.
I am not kidding, I want halfsies…
“Can’t compete with the global super rich? Lower your standards and be happy!”
Just because they’ve trained you to believe you need the latest 2nm chips (which is conveniently their highest margin product) doesn’t mean you really need them.
So personal computers of year 1999 gave their users that feeling of magic that can still be felt from media of that time, and state-of-the-art chips were being produced in fabs located not only on Taiwan, but USA, Israel, elsewhere.
Personal computers of today don’t give any feeling of magic to most their users, you have to look for it.
Yet considering a standard still above what you realistically need is somehow lowering your standards.
In year 2006 they’d say about computers how many books you can fit into this or that volume of memory, or which calculations you can perform, sometimes, to give you perspective. They don’t do that now, because then you’d be depressed how many resources you are using for something more vulgar than porn.
It’s just sad.
For most people, computers became powerful enough around the year 2005. A machine from late in the Windows XP era could run 3D games, CAD software, edit video, communicate with the entire world through broadband internet. What abilities have PCs taken on since? So much processing power filled up by doing the same tasks less efficiently for no reason.
Well CAD software has made leaps and bounds since then. Anyone who used CAD back in the day would know what an unstable clusterfuck it was and how much longer it took than now.
A lot of software has gotten much better, including “core” Foss like Linux and FFMPEG. There is just 10x as much software that is horrible, and windows has gotten so much worse to the point that it feels like computers have made no progress when you use it.
Also, CPUs nowadays use about the same power as they did 20 years ago but with an order of magnitude more processing power, and the idle power consumption is much much much lower. The first Core 2 Duo had a 65W TDP, the same as modern Ryzen 5. GPUs are just out of hand with power consumption because of profit-driven game companies and AI.
I will assert that, again, for most people, instead of computers remaining at the same TDP but increasing vastly in processing power, they would have been fine with the same processing power at vastly decreased TDP. Look at how long people held onto Win 7, and how long they held onto Win XP before that. Because they were fine, possibly better than the new offering, especially since you already owned it. Some time around 2012, anyone who wasn’t a power user ran out of reasons to get excited for new computers.
I would agree, if websites and webapps wouldn’t be so bloated as they are. if the rich wouldn’t make us to downgrade out of their gluttony. but also, old technology is not that easily available. production lines have been shut down long ago, and if everyone went to the used market, nothing would be available even there anymore.
production lines have been shut down long ago,
If there were demand, that could change.
I agree. Most people are spoiled little lazy ass brats now. Im so glad i wasn’t born any later so I can actually appreciate what we have.
At the same time, fuck these billionaire accelerstioniats for trying to destroy earth while taking what little enjoyment away we can have.
This is how existence works, yes. Being happy means adjusting your wants to what you have.
“I’m just saying they don’t need to have 30 dolls. They can have three. They don’t need to have 250 pencils. They can have five.”
Being happy means adjusting your wants to what you have.
Oh I guess I should be happy that ICE only raided my neighbors and not me. Amirite?
No, numbnuts. It means you shouldn’t be happy.
but you can’t compete with them. you should really be adjusting your wants! be happy you are alive
Well…yes? Are you not happy you did not get raided? Would you rather have had that you also got raided?
My point is: Just because someone isn’t “suffering as much as others” doesn’t mean the stuff they go through (like the fears of ICE for example) aren’t valid.
Both points are true:
- You can recognize that, yes you have it better than others.
BUT ALSO:
- It doesn’t mean you should accept status quo forever.
Because accepting status quo is like saying, “why are you complaining about trump? at least you aren’t in taliban afghanistan or north korea”
Yes we all know…and clearly you’re the only.one who didn’t get it
yeah, people who live in the US of A should be just happy they are still alive!
Isn’t this a tenet of Buddhism?
Yep, that’s all it is. Desire is the cause of suffering.
Which isn’t to say you should never desire anything. Just know the price and choose.
💩 take
Fuck Buddhism, amirite?
If you’re upset with my feedback, adjust your expectations.
That’s exactly the point. I’m not upset because I don’t expect people online to have any sort of sense. I adjusted that expectation long ago and I’m much happier for it.
But you seem to be assuming that I’m saying everyone should just drop their expectations and be happy. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that suffering is caused by desire. So if you can reduce your desire, you can reduce your suffering.
But many times you can’t, or shouldn’t, reduce your desire. I won’t ever desire to be okay with what’s happening in my country, for example. I choose to be unhappy with it.
So choose to be fucking unhappy. It’s okay to be unhappy. I’m not going to judge you for it.
What’s the difference between that and suppressing your true feelings? From my perspective, it just seems like a strategy for bottling up what you actually feel rather than letting your true feelings out. On the surface at least, it sounds like that’s a recipe for it blowing up at some point in a much worse way?
The difference is changing your mind.
If we were talking about stuff like healthcare, food, housing, electricity, clean water, public transit, or access to information, I’d be on the same page.
But this is a luxury hobby. And with luxury hobbies, there’s usually some flexibility. You don’t need a high-end PC to play games. You can run plenty on a lower-end setup, try different genres, or even step away from PC gaming altogether.
You could have friends over for a tabletop game, go for a run, hit the gym, or try something like rock climbing. There are lots of ways to spend your time without needing top-tier gear
Bought my am5 pc late 2023, bought extra storage and a new phone last summer. I don’t need anything right now but I can’t wait for this bubble to pop.
I lucked out so hard, I just built my PC in September.
Ddr3 was kind of the point where the technology stopped incrementing with large jumps.
Not saying ddr3 is as good as ddr4 or 5 but I used ddr3 until 2021 with no issue.
I’m still using DDR3 as I haven’t upgraded my computer in like 6years. It’s fine. I can play most games at 4k and I’m rocking an Nvidia 4070. I don’t really see any compelling reason to upgrade until GTA6 comes out. (I can play gta5 just fine)
Hope I’m not stupid for saying this but I haven’t been able to tell the difference between DDR3 and DDR4
Honestly, I don’t feel a difference since switching to ddr4. I just had to for my new motherboard, that’s all.
Yep, it works fine for my day to day stuff. And runs many games just fine. I still run my Ivy Bridge Xeon CPU (bought for cheap years ago). Pair a X79 chipset, Xeon with quad channel memory, and say an Arc A770. You can do many modern tasks and games just fine. And for cheap.
Same but 2024. I missed all of DDR4. Jumped straight from 3 to 5.
I’ve noticed my ram speed much less than the amount of ram for quite some time.
SSDs were game changers.
My mom and dad both have ancient machines at home and I swapped both to SATA SSDs. The improvement was incredible. They went from basically unusable, in my opinion, to completely functional for anything they would be doing.
I went 2 to 4, and honestly my 5800x w 32GB DDR4 @3800 from 2020 is still just fine, hopefully till this shitshow shakes out.
Yeah I’m on a 5700 or something with 64 GB of DDR4 and I don’t see any issues with it yet. I went that route because I could keep my mobo and it was also way cheaper than DDR5 back then. I figured I’d rather have more older RAM than a full system upgrade.
Is RAM already at a price that it’s worth considering selling one of those sticks? :3
Yeah I’m on a 5700 or something with 64 GB of DDR4 and I don’t see any issues with it yet. I went that route because I could keep my mobo and it was also way cheaper than DDR5 back then. I figured I’d rather have more older RAM than a full system upgrade.
Is RAM already at a price that it’s worth considering selling one of those sticks? :3
Im still on ddr3 and an amd fx. I can play every game except Alan wake 2.
I dont play most aaa slop though.
I play too much path of exile for that to be acceptable sadly
The sheer glut of load zones means even a spinning disk is unacceptable. I literally saved over an hour in time over a weekend back in the day going from ddr3 to 4, and three hours over a weekend going from a spinning disk to a solid state.
And the games only gotten larger in the last few years…
Ddr3 is great! Till you have to deal with a lot of load zones. ):
You gotta get on Alan Wake 2. I’ve been having a great time playing it. Play the first and Control before you do and you’ll see a lot of tie-ins which is pretty fun. One of the characters looks a lot like Max Payne too.
I thought Control was excellent, but the original Alan Wake was a bad joke.
You gotta get on Alan Wake 2.
Bit cruel after they just said they can’t run it 😄
I have played both previous alan wakes and control! Great games. I need to play quantum break next.
Okay good! I played Control years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. I picked it back up from the beginning a number of months back and got hooked. I had a price watch on Alan Wake 2 from a couple years ago and it finally hit my target so I got it. I figured I should play through the first Alan Wake so I played it and enjoyed it significantly more than I thought I would. Now I’m probably a quarter of the way through 2 and I’m really liking it a lot. I definitely want to check out Quantum Break also.
Don’t forget american nightmare. Really good!
I actually picked that one up on the Steam winter sale and plan on playing it soon!
There’s a lot of AAA that isn’t slop. That sounds like coping.
Would you be able to run something like Horizon Forbidden West at moderate settings and 60 fps?
There’s a lot of AAA that isn’t slop. That sounds like coping.
Honestly this. I really need people to start defining what they think a AAA game is, because I feel like my definition is different. In my mind, a AAA game is any game made by a large well-known company that either has a series/brandname for itself (i.e. Mario, Resident Evil, CoD) or one that has poured a shit ton of money into it (usually due to employee count). Usually a mainline game, not side or spin-off.
And so going off of that, I truly struggle to think of a AAA game I have played in the last 3 years that could truly be called slop. The only game in that timeline that makes me go “eh”, was FFXV, but I don’t think the game is pure slop, it’s just obviously incomplete without the DLC story. There are people still crying about this game and saying they miss the characters, and it’s more than a decade old now, so I feel it’s hard to call it slop.
Maybe it’s because I mostly enjoy single player games over multi and I play more Japanese than western games, but I don’t know why people buy the latest CoD or Madden and expect it to be significantly different from the last game. Like we know EA does microtransactions, stop buying their fucking games! Why do we expect 95% of SaaS games to be remotely good?
And not that I think indies suck, because I think they’re great too! But people make it sound like every indie game is going to change your life, when there are thousands of indies out there that are just okay. Hell, some big name “indies” aren’t even indies, they’re AA games like CO:E33. And some indies have unfortunately felt lackluster for me, like Cassette Beasts.
Gamers don’t do nuance. It’s either the greatest thing ever or it’s slop. Nothing in between. I hate this mentality.
Agreed, although I have almost no experience with Japanese games like FF as I don’t vibe with those for some reason (but I love Japanese cinema). But other than that, I hear you. 👍
Don’t even know of that game.
I dont really stay up to date on super new games either tbh. I have a huge console collection so a lot of my gaming is spent there as well. Besides, I dont pay more than 20 dollars for games, so I dont buy new ones.
Also, since I refuse to run windows, quite a few scummy game companies are purposely locking out linux users with their trash anti cheat. So I wont play those games and have no want to.
Oh also I just looked up that game. I cant stand that kind of game so I would never feel the need to play it. Too much fantasy and flashiness for me. Wayy too complex to be fun for people who dont game 12 hours a day.
super new games
I dont pay more than 20 dollars
I paid €16 for Horizon Zero Dawn, it came out in 2017… 🤷♂️ One of the best single player games I’ve ever played. Runs on Linux. Played the whole game on Linux. Played in sessions of a few hours a time. I have 2 kids and played this game.
I think you are using a lot of assumptions here. But if you really don’t like that kind of game, fair enough.
I’m just saying, there are a lot of high value games which are not slop. All I’m saying.
Thats a good deal! It looked like it was $60 now…
Yeah makes sense. I just get an ick reaction to most of those super fantasy games, like the FF games which I avoided forever but did start playing FFXIV and I do enjoy it most of the time, its just so many names and places and game mechanics to remember. I also play probably 20+ different games a week, very rarely do i ever play 1 game at a time.
Also, to me any game around 2010 era is still brand new lol. 2017 may as well have been just released xD
Yep id agree youre right.
It was a really good deal! I bought it for €19,90 again one time for a friend. I don’t think he played through it all. 😆 He plays a game for like 6 months then drops it…
I 100%'d Horizon Zero Dawn. Sooo good. The story was amazing, the pacing, how they slowly introduce mechanics to you to ease you into advanced combat mechanics, how you slowly gain access to armour, weapons, etc. Just masterful. And the story, super engaging. It’s very well received. 🥰
I think it’s probably a little bit different from the FF games, but I can’t say for sure as I never played those.
But yeah, anyway, I’m glad you’re able to play all you want and need to play without upgrading. It’s very nice to be able to save money for a rainy day. 😁
Thinking the avg lemmy user plays games that are newer then 2008 is were you fucked up.
People that use this platform basically are glorified luddites when it comes to gaming unless you go to extremely specific gaming areas. Then it’s like 2018 instead of 2008.
Thinking the avg lemmy user plays games that are newer th[a]n 2008 is were you fucked up.
I didn’t think that. I asked if they’d be able to play it. It’s an inquiry about their system more than what they like to play.
They did say they can play “every game” except one.
I was going to say I play Factorio which is fairly new until I looked up when it entered early access… :/
Here I was thinking they were recommending a game that ran well with low RAM or something. Like WTF is Dead Dead Redemption 3?
Nooooooo nonononoooooo…Dance Dance Revolution 3 👍
You’ve gotta daaance all your troubles awayyy…
NnTssNnTssNnTss…I think that weird kibble might be kicking in
The biggest problem with DDR3 is that the last (consumer) boards/CPUs that could use it are really, REALLY old. 5th-gen Intel or AM3 AMD. Which means you’re looking at a full decade old, at the newest. These boards also probably can’t do more than 32GB.
Now, I suppose if you only need 32GB RAM and a CPU that’s pathetic by modern standards, then this is a viable path. But that’s going to be a very small group of people.
I think this is actually most people. Power users and hardcore gamers are a relatively small portion of the PC market.
I would be surprised if this is still true, at least for home use. It seems like the non-gamer, non-power user segment of the PC market just switched over to tablets and smartphones instead. PCs and laptops just aren’t really necessary anymore for “normal” people who just want to check their email, watch YouTube, and surf the web.
like this is anecdotal but most of my family has PC’s that are getting a bit long in the tooth but they still use it just fine for all the basic internet shit they do. Alot of folks would rather check their banking or emails on a bigger screen. My mom’s computer for example is almost 10 years old, if I throw Linux on it she’s good till the thing just up and dies.
She asked about buying a new PC this year and I just laughed and said “no, you enjoy having a roof over your head right?”
Yeah, my mom asked me for suggestions on a new computer since hers couldn’t do win11, so I just threw mint on it. She had no trouble making the switch.
I can see that eating into some PC use, but plenty of Millennials I know still prefer laptops or even desktops for casual use.
I intentionally ignore the vast majority of everything on my phone until I can get to a real computer. Phones and tablets feel like unmitigated torture and I loathe it every time I have to use one to do something
Non-gamers only. I recently replaced my mobo by a slightly older (the model, the board itself was brand new) industrial PC board. 32GB DDR3, NVidia Quadro K2200, 2 x gigabit ethernet, USB 3.1, five serial ports, three programmable digital IO ports, hardware watchdog, i7-4770 CPU @ 3.40GHz. It’s a Loonix machine and I don’t use it for gaming but I do a lot of animation, video editing, µcontroller programming and 3D-modelling with it. Super reliable, fast enough for most stuff. If I need more raytracing power, I just cluster it with my Lenovo p15.
As someone with a high end PC I can also spend a happy afternoon with my gameboy advance that has less than half a megabyte of RAM, so even in a power user and gamer context the hardware is what you make of it. There’s so much more out there than just the latest and most pathetically optimized titles.
Non-power users would have no operating system, no Windows 11 support and grandma isn’t going to learn Linux
Grandma doesn’t need to “learn” Linux
Most of the older generation compute almost entirely through a web browser. They often struggle with the amount of notifications / solicitations that come up in a a Windows OS, as they can have trouble discerning between what is real and what is a scam - becoming fundamentally distrustful of everything as a result.
Through my repair shop, I’ve transitioned plenty of older generation folks to Linux Mint with minimal friction.
Main area where that can get a bit more complicated is for those who are clinging to an older piece of software they’re unwilling to let go of.
I exclusively use Linux and have several family members who have Linux laptops.
I don’t think it is impossible, but they require someone in their life that can handle the issues.
They’re going to have a much harder time finding support for a Linux machine than a Windows machine.
Some enterprising teenager should offer to upgrade peoples PCs to Linux, especially as Windows 11 is pushed harder. They could even offer a tech support option for a yearly fee.
That’s what the hardware requirement bypass and a techie friend are for.
I manage a whole computer lab full of 3rd to 5th gen Intels with 8GB of RAM that run Windows 11 just fine.
hardware requirement bypass? hell no. at that point 10 LTSC and activation bypass
For personal use maybe. Not for a public organization that can get sued into oblivion if caught pirating.
For a general use or gaming PC, 32GB is more than enough for the majority of users. It might show its limits with use as a server or dedicated database using complex queries.
Heck, even as servers go, I’ve got an AMD mini-PC running a Ryzen 5700u with 32 GB RAM. It’s running Plex, Jellyfin, AudioBookShelf, Home Assistant, Asset UPnP, and a few other apps, plus has some small extra VMs occasionally for testing stuff and I’m hardly utilizing it, nowhere near capacity. I’m never using more than 8 out of 16 threads, and about half the RAM is still available even under full load scenarios when I’m running updates and using Plex heavily (such as scanning intros, or doing acoustic analysis for Plexamp use).
Most of the time under normal use, it’s practically idle, and RAM use is low (Proxmox with memory minimums and ballooning).
These boards also probably can’t do more than 32GB.
what is the difference between this and having new board, but not being able to afford that 32gb anyway?
My daily driver is a PowerEdge T620 with 48 Ivy Bridge cores (2x E5-2969 v2) and 384 GiB of DDR3-1333. It’s a bit of a power hog yes, but it’s still cheaper than upgrading to a more modern system with at least that much DDR4/5, and the only things where performance has been an obstacle has been a few more recent games (most recently Clair Obscur, which was bottlenecked by my GPU with the CPUs at pretty low utilization).
This is basically the exact scenario that led me to detail that I was only talking about consumer gear. Server gear is a very different beast, with a variety of tradeoffs that I didn’t want to get into. For instance, I’m assuming you can only use Registered RAM.
Fair enough, it seems I overlooked the parenthesis in your original comment.
You have a small sever as a daily driver
Small?
lol my main pc runs on a Xeon from 2011 and 16 GB of DDR3. Now it doesn’t play games newer than 2016 but that’s besides the point as I rarely play anything made past 2011
Oh so you like good games too?
Haha
I’ve been doing active development for high processing stuff (computer vision and AI) on a Xeon 1230v5 (Skylake), 32GB of RAM, and a 1080ti up until a few months ago (before RAM prices skyrocketed). It was perfectly usable.
The only place where it didn’t do well was in compile times and newer AAA games that were CPU bound. But for 99% of games it was fine.
The only time I ran into RAM issues was when I had a lot of browser tabs open and multiple IDEs running. For gaming and any other non-dev task, 32GB is more than plenty.
The list of vulnerability mitigations for those old CPUs is going to be a mile long. They will probably have their performance cut in half or worse. Even a much newer CPU like Zen 1 takes a big performance hit.
You can disable mitigations, but then a malicious website could potentially steal sensitive information on that computer.
There are server chips like the E7-8891 v3 which lived in a weird middle ground of supporting both ddr3 and ddr4. On paper, it’s about on par with a ryzen 5 5500 and they’re about $20 on US eBay. I’ve been toying with the idea of buying an aftermarket/used server board to see if it holds up the way it appears to on paper. $20 for a CPU (could even slot 2), $80 for a board, $40 for 32gb of ddr3 in quad chanel. ~$160 for a set of core components doesn’t seem that bad in modern times, especially if you can use quad/oct channel to offset the bandwidth difference between ddr3 and ddr4.
I think finding a cooler and a case would be the hardest part
These server boards are usually the same as scientific and engineering workstation boards. They’re pretty good if you put the right CPU in. Xeon or i7 4770 and you’ll get a quite useable workstation out of them.
Its been good for my homelab
Now, I suppose if you only need 32GB RAM and a CPU that’s pathetic by modern standards, then this is a viable path. But that’s going to be a very small group of people.
It’s not that bad. For the most part, it would still be a viable machine these days, though weaker than it used to be. Computers haven’t changed quite as much as they used to, compared to the period leading into the 2010s.
My desktop is still a 4th gen intel. You’re not going to get bleeding-edge performance or efficiency out of it, but it’s hardly a slug. If anything, I’d argue it to more likely be the majority of computers. People don’t upgrade that often, especially if the computer works fine and doesn’t lag horribly.
Can confirm, I recently maxed out the RAM on my decade-old rig at 32GB. At least the used DDR3 RAM was cheap. With motherboards that old you are limited to processors like Intel Haswell with 4 cores, pretty anemic by today’s standards.
It works just fine for me running Linux and doing minimal gaming. 90% of my gaming these days is on the SteamDeck anyway.
I thought as I got older I would have more money to buy current gen PC parts and build basically whatever I wanted. Turns out priorities just shifted and things got even more expensive.
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Sure, you can do that. You might as well be gaming on a Steam Deck though, because that’s the level of CPU you’d be limited to.
Which is fine, I’ve got a Legion Go S, it works fine as long as you’re aware of the limitations.
But if I want the AAA big screen shiz, I’m loading up something on my PS5.
I hadn’t actually looked up any numbers on the RAM shortage. Less than a year ago I got 2 8GB sticks of no-name PC3200 DDR4 for less than $25. I didn’t even really need it for my use-case, but it was so cheap that “why not” felt like a perfectly viable reason to upgrade to 32GB total. Six years ago I got the original two-pack of 8GB sticks for $75. Now that same amount of old-ass DDR4 would be $90-$100. Jeezus. No upgrades for me for a while.
My pc uses DDR2 and it runs Linux with no problem. I can even game, just not the new ones
I had 96 GB DDR3 for sale and no one even looked at the ad. $20.
DDr3 works well with Linux (and older Windows OS) for many applications. Just don’t play games, and don’t use AI for a while - you’ll be smooth sailing for a few years before prices fall. Use other devices instead - phones/tablets.
I’ve got a PC with an i7-4770k, 32GB of RAM, and RTX 3090 that plays games just fine (and does runs local LLMs just fine too).
Forget the RAM, don’t you get CPU limited?
Every game I’ve tried works fine. Including resource hungry games like Cyberpunk 2077. It’s my understanding that games are typically light on the CPU because they typically also try to target consoles which don’t have very good CPUs. It is noticeably slower at some (highly parallelize-able) tasks, but is fine for any game I’ve tried. The CPU is probably roughly equivalent to the CPU in a Steam Deck.
I’m fine on DDR4. DDR5 feels to me, something I’ll get into in like 5 - 10 years from now. This is from someone who has sat on DDR2 and DDR3 machines for extended periods of time. If they’re still doing the job I want them to, no complaints.
