Don't worry, if you are happy with those specs you can get corporate ewaste dell towers on ebay for low prices. "Dell precision tower", I just saw a listing for 32gb ram, Xeon 3.6ghz for about 300 usd.

Personally, at work I use the latest hardware at home I use ewaste.

> I've never been more fearful of components breaking than current day.

The mid 90s was pretty scary too. Minimum wage was $4.25 and a new Pentium 133 was $935 in bulk.

I agree with you on SSDs, that was the last upgrade that felt like flipping the “modern computer” switch overnight. Everything since has been incremental unless you’re doing ML or high-end gaming.

As other mentionned, there are plenty of refurbished stuff and second hand parts that there isn't any risk of finding yourself having to buy something at insane prices if your computer was to die today.

If you don't need a GPU for gaming you can get a decent computer with an i5, 16GB of ram and an nvme drive for usd 50. I bought one a few weeks ago ago.

You can still get brand new generic motherboards for old CPUs.

I swapped out old ASUS MBs for an i3-540 and an Athlon II X4 with brand new motherboards.

They are quite cheaper than getting a new kit, so I guess that's the market they cater to: people who don't need an upgrade but their MBs gave in.

You can get these for US$20-US$30.

About a month ago, the mobo for my 5950x decided to give up the ghost. I decided to just rebuild the whole thing and update from scratch.

So went crazy and bought a 9800X3D, purchased a ridiculous amount of DDR5 RAM (96GB, which matches my old machine’s DDR4 RAM quantity). At the time, it was about $400 USD or so.

I’ve been living in blissful ignorance since then. Seeing this post, I decided to check Amazon. The same amount of RAM is currently $1200!!!

For a DDR3-era machine, you'd be buying RAM for that on Ebay, not Newegg.

I have an industrial Mini-ITX motherboard of similar vintage that I use with an i5-4570 as my Unraid machine. It doesn't natively support NVMe, but I was able to get a dual-m2 expansion card with its own splitter (no motherboard bifurcation required) and that let me get a pretty modern-feeling setup with nice fast cache disks.

I’m worried about the Valve mini PC coming out next year.

Instant buy $700 or under. Probably buy up to $850. At, like, $1,100, though… solid no. And I’m counting on that thing to take the power-hog giant older Windows PC tower so bulky it’s unplugged and in a closet half the time, out of my house.

I am still running an i5 4690k, really all I need is better GPU but those prices are criminal. I wish I got a 4090 when I had the chance rip

A few years later but similarly - I am still running a machine built spur-of-the-moment in a single trip to Micro Center for about $500 in late 2019 (little did we know what was coming in a few months!). I made one small upgrade in probably ~2022 to a Ryzen 5800X w/ 64GB of RAM but otherwise untouched. It still flies through basically anything & does everything I need, but I'm dreading when any of the major parts go and I have to fork out double or triple the original cost for replacements...

If I needed a budget build, I'd probably look in the direction of used parts on AliExpress, you can sometimes find good deals on AM4 CPUs (that platform had a lot of longevity, even now my main PC has a Ryzen 7 5800X) and for whatever reason RX 580 GPUs were really, really widespread (though typically the 2048SP units). Not amazing by any means, but a significant upgrade from your current setup and if you don't get particularly unlucky, it might last for years with no issues.

Ofc there's also the alternate strategy of going for a mid/high end rig and hoping it lasts a decade, but the current DDR5 prices make me depressed so yeah maybe not.

I genuinely hope that at some point the market will get flooded with good components with a lot of longevity and reasonable prices again in the next gens: like AM4 CPUs, like that RX 580, or GTX 1080 Ti but I fear that Nvidia has learnt their lesson in releasing stuff that pushes you in the direction of incremental upgrades rather than making something really good for the time, same with Intel's LGA1851 being basically dead on arrival, after the reviews started rolling in (who knows, maybe at least mobos and Core Ultra chips will eventually be cheap as old stock). On the other hand, at least something like the Arc B580 GPUs were a step in the right direction - competent and not horribly overpriced (at least when it came to MSRP, unfortunately the merchants were scumbags and often ignored it).

Don't all RAM manufacturers offer a lifetime warranty?

That said, if the shortage gets bad enough then maybe they could find themselves in a situation where they were unable/unwilling to honor warranty claims?

Man, it was just GPU for a while. But same boat. I regret not getting the 4090 for $1600 direct from Nvidia. "That's too much for a video card", and got the 4080 instead. I dread the day when I need to replace it.

You can still buy DDR4 for pretty cheap, and if you're replacing a computer that old any system built around DDR4 will still be a massive jump in performance.

GPU prices are actually at MSRP now for most cards other than the 5090.

You could still easily build a $800-$900 system that would dramatically jump forward from that machine.

$700 in 2014 is now $971 inflation adjusted (BLS calculator).

RTX 3060 12gb $180 (eBay). Sub $200 CPU (~5-7 times faster than yours). 16gb DDR4 $100-$120. $90 PSU. $100 motherboard. WD Black 1tb SSD $120. Roughly $800 (which inflation adjusted beats your $700).

Right now is a rather amazing time for CPUs, even though RAM prices have gone crazy.

Assume you find some deals somewhere in there, you could do slightly better with either pricing or components.

> For general computer usage, SSDs really were a once in a generation "holy shit, this upgrade makes a real difference" thing.

The last one were I really remember seeing a huge speed bump was going from a regular SSD to a NVMe M.2 PCIe SSD... Around 2015 I bought one of the very first consumer motherboard with a NVMe M.2 slot and put a Samsung 950 Pro in it: that was quite something (now I was upgrading the entire machine, not just the SSD, so there's that too). Before that I don't remember when I switched from SATA HDD to SATA SSD.

I'm now running one of those WD SN850X Black NVMe SSD but my good old trusty, now ten years old, Samsung 950 Pro is still kicking (in the wife's PC). There's likely even better out there and they're easy to find: they're still reasonably priced.

As for my 2015 Core i7-6700K: it's happily running Proxmox and Docker (but not always on).

Even consumer parts are exceptionally reliable: the last two failures I remember, in 15 years (and I've got lots of machines running), are a desktop PSU (replaced by a Be Quiet! one), a no-name NVMe SSD and a laptop's battery.

Oh and my MacBook Air M1's screen died overnight for no reason after precisely 13 months, when I had a warranty of 12 months, (some refer to it as the "bendgate") but that's because first gen MacBook Air M1 were indescribable pieces of fragile shit. I think Apple got their act together and came up with better screens in later models.

Don't worry too much: PCs are quite reliable things. And used parts for your PC from 2014 wouldn't be expensive on eBay anyway. You're not forced to upgrade to a last gen PC with DDR5 (atm 3x overpriced) and a 5090 GPU.

I got a used M1 MacBook Air a year ago.

By far the fastest computer I’ve ever used. It felt like the SSD leap of years earlier.

Am I crazy for thinking that anyone using computers for doing their job and making their income should have a $5k/year computer hardware budget at a minimum? I’m not saying to do what I do and buy a $7k laptop and a $15k desktop every year but compared to revenue it seems silly to be worrying about a few thousand dollars per year delta.

I buy the best phones and desktops money can buy, and upgrade them often, because, why take even the tiniest risk that my old or outdated hardware slows down my revenue generation which is orders of magnitude greater than their cost to replace?

Even if you don’t go the overkill route like me, we’re talking about maybe $250/month to have an absolutely top spec machine which you can then use to go and earn 100x that.

Spend at least 1% of your gross revenue on your tools used to make that revenue.