There's a lot of overlap in those two groups

Right wing lunatics are big in both.

Crypto because the hurrdurr keep gubmint outta my lyfe shit (despite the fact that crypto is infinitely more easy to track than cash..), and AI because they hate liberal reality, so AI lets them generate all the videos they could hope to have to validate their fake victimhoods.

Imagine when the crypto train was full on, somebody said that something other will come along where the crypto train will be small joke in comparison.

Its the necessary pieces for the next steps. They need crypto for programmable money so they can turn you off, digital ID so they can track your every move in the modern world, AI combined with mass surveillance to enforce it all. Someone wants this world, thats for sure.

Even if AI somehow falls off the trend, I feel like we'll see another stupid way to throw mountains of processing power at something. I can't wait to see what goofy shit they'll come up with.

AI is killing people and civilization.

A few companies or departments have already shuttered for this exact reason.

In online communities at least, people seem to be keen to stay on the cutting edge and always have the best and shiniest. Toms Hardware is going to attract this very audience.

I accept that I'm probably too far the other way on the spectrum of patient gamers......but people don't seem to think of the utility of the item and rather stay obsessed with "10% performance gains". For the vast majority of people, phones, laptops and computers can easily last over 5 years (sometimes 10 years depending on use case).

Although these frequent upgraders do give a good stock of items for people like me to pick up and stay in the sweetspot of positioning behind the frontline of cutting edge products on the secondhand market.

Anecdotally but several of my friends build a new PC and then slide their old one to siblings who game but don't need high end

Yeah I found that strange too most of my gaming PCs have lasted me somewhere between 7 and 10 years. Would seem completely unnecessary for most people

I would imagine that 40% is saying that hoping for a best case scenario to occur. Prices haven't even plateaued yet, they are still rising, so at some point regardless their enthusiasm they will be priced out of the market.

The thought that hardware prices will drop to normal levels in the next few years is just wishful thinking.

The question is kind of weird. I want to build a new gaming computer, but that is nothing I'm doing at current prices and I can totally live without building a new one. If that one breaks, I might reconsider. But I really do not know if there are people around who are planning to build a new computer in May 2028.

I replaced my old PC only because I went from an i5 6600 to a ryzen 7800x3d and thus needed to replace the RAM as well.
Combone that with an old 4GB 960 and an older 2TB HDD and wanting another case the math was quite easy.

It's alao a quesrion how you interpret that? At what point is it a new PC vs upgrading? If you have replaced all parts from the original starting build?
Might explain the higher percentage

I recently built new to pass my current rig to my kid who is only interested in Roblox and other smaller games. And I mean the entire rig, including the desk.

Don't forget this market insanity started around COVID, and has basically been succeeded by consequent crises with few dips.

The typical release cadence of PC components is around 4-6 years, which requires new motherboard, CPU, and RAM.
Adding in the GPU basically results in a new build, and that's being generous assuming no upgrades/changes to other parts like PSU and storage.

My take is that a lot of these people wishing to upgrade are those who have simply been holding out since 2020 or earlier. This seems to vaguely match up with the Steam Hardware results, with a fair number of people still using RTX 3000 series or RX 6000 series, of which even the top end cards are starting to become par/outperformed by their modern mid level counterparts.

I think you may overestimate how many people build their PCs instead of buying a prebuilt.

I finally got round to a significant upgrade to my PC last week. I've been running the same PC for 10 years, and it's really been dying. Fans and HDDs were failing, and it couldn't play new games at all.

I haven't replaced my GPU (still on a GTX 980ti) but I jumped to some decent DDR4 RAM, a better CPU, and moved into an SFF case, but I have no confidence any prices are set to stabilise, so I just gave in and built what I could.

I don't believe in "just upgrading" at this point. If you built your PC with efficiency in mind, there's like nothing you can even "upgrade". Anything I can think of will get outdated by the time you need the next thing. A new GPU? Oh, you are still on Gen3... that means a new motherboard. Updating from AM4 to AM..4? Nah that feels like bad value, but AM5 requires DDR5, both of which have already been out for almost 5 years and will likely get replaced in a year or 2. Upgrading RAM? Again, just bumping DDR4 for a marginally better/larger cap DDR4 feels like bad value and unwarranted. Storage? Whoops, your old motherboard doesn't support NVMe booting and it's BIOS hasn't been touched in over 5 years! You are lucky if you even have an M.2 slot.

And believe it or not, these prices are not even the worst they've ever been, so might as well just get a new PC every 5 or so years, maybe keep your old storage, CPU cooler, PSU and case, but that's about it.

It can be people budding into the genre. They’ve heard about how nice Steam is, and maybe play some games on a cheap laptop, but recognize a genuine desktop is the better experience.

One streamer I follow is in that situation. She streams off her PS5 and Switch, but has a donation incentive to help build her PC.

I might fall in that category, depending on how they'd ask me. I have a solid PC I built after crypto stopped inflating the prices but just before the RAM shortage and I'm mostly good, but I've got the money and have been thinking I could upgrade soon as a treat. Not at these prices though.

So it all depends if the situation improves in the next two years somewhat. This year? No chance, IMO. next year? Maybe. Maybe I'm too optimistic. But I definitely wouldn't rule out be building a new PC in that timeframe.

i built a monster pc in 2024 and maxed out the RAM and CPU the motherboard could handle. New 4k monitor and a 32gb RTX video card. I think I spent about $1.5k

no way could I get that stuff for the same price. I could probably sell the parts for more

it's still a monster and in Linux, I can tweak it just a bit more to get everything it can give.

I'm thinking that the way games have progressed in the last 5 years, there's nothing on the horizon that says prepare for the new technology that will blow my mind

Don't worry they'll turn their datacenters into virtual PC hosting so that people who can't afford to upgrade will have to rent the hardware...

Devs were incentivised to write more efficient, leaner code because resources were expensive.

AI are the devs now. And efficient code is probably the last thing they are known for doing.

That's absolutely the end goal. You'll own nothing and you'll like it.

I had exactly the same experience and I use the Linux machine for gaming.

Replacing Windows with Linux feels equivalent to a CPU and memory upgrade.

New is nice, but not at these prices, yeesh. I built my new rig just before the RAMpocalypse. And also the rig before that in 2020 just before the crypto had inflated the GPU prices too high. Call me lucky. Hopefully the prices go down in about five years. 😅

Gratz, good decision.

I live on the other side of the pond and did not build a new rig in 2024, because the tariffs were never going to affect me much... Did not foresee the bubble inflating this big though. I originally wanted to build in autumn 2025, now I have no idea when it'll actually happen.

One of my motherboard's memory slots went bad, no idea why. Figuring out if it was RAM or, if the motherboard, exactly what was wrong, was a tense few hours because neither is getting replaced.

that's especially true since games just kinda stopped looking better imo. i think 2014-2019 was the peak of game graphics, i just can't stand that smeary ai upscaled temporal anti-aliasing look, i prefer msaa or just plain ssaa, it looks so much crisper

This is what I've done for 35 years. My current build is almost seven years old. My previous build, now 12 years old, is my current media server, the ones before that are recycled.

Also, by the time I build a new one, I need to research everything all over again, because it's all changed so much. I don't keep up with the hardware very well between builds.

I don't think this defeats the purpose, as I don't expect a computer to last forever. I do reuse what few parts I can, such as power supplies, cases, fans, and hard drives.

I think it's always been like that, unless you upgrade a CPU for a 10% improvement.

I tended to do GPU as one upgrade, then the rest a few years later, treating the RAM, CPU and mobo as one unit.

But since prices of everything have been out of whack for ages now, I'm sticking with this 1060/i5-8400 box until something gives. If I want the latest whizzo graphics, I'll play my PS5.

From my own experience I would say that you're probably not finding a chance to do intermediary upgrades because upfront you bought the top-range everything and maxed out things like memory and storage, and/or did not get a really good hobbyist motherboard (which is the part where you should really splurge).

I don't get into the muggers' game of top-range were you pay 2x-3x for just an extra 10% performance but instead get the stuff at the sweet-spot of price-performance, and then some years latter I can get stuff with what was before top-range performance at normal prices without a premium.

Similarly I don't max out on things like memory and storage from the very start - I get what I need then and when I see that I need more I get more, by which point normally (not this shit going on right now) Moore's Law means it's way cheaper.

For example, the PC I'm using now for gaming recently got an improved CPU which wasn't even out when I first bought this PC and which was near top range back then (as server CPU, even), which would've been $200 back then but was only $17 second hand some years later.

Of course, this way of doing things got totally fucked up with this PC parts bubble. Frankly the last PC upgrade I did was replacing Windows with Linux which in terms of how it feels was equivalent to a CPU and memory upgrade.

Mine is about 7 and I keep forgetting it’s not “current gen” because it still runs new games at mid-high settings at the framerate and resolutions I care about.

The case in the picture looks cool, but it doesn’t have an optical drive. I have a a Fractal case too though, but it was one of the only ones I could find that had an optical drive slot.

Same, I don't know if I'll ever get another PC case. It just looks so good

I was about to comment about seeing my case in the thumbnail. Its classy and has such great airflow lol.

Just wish the front io cables were longer 😭

Same! I have the black one though

Join an improv group, take dance classes or join a theatre club. If that's not your vibe then join a board game club or learn to play an instrument. I've seen lots of people take up new hobbies since this nonsense started. At first this whole AI thing really bummed me out but it's made me get in touch with the things I really care about. I think we're headed for interesting times

Might I suggest model railroading? Plenty of expenses to sink money into plus you can make almost everything yourself or buy used stuff from the 80s to save money if you wish too. It can be very time consuming if you want it to be too!

Also you mentioned reading and hiking, both are brilliant hobbies. I fell in love with biking by accident and just rode 7 miles today! Only problem is if you go hard enough into biking you'll sleep too hard to read before bed!

Both in the sense that you'll be able to get a decent playable experience on fairly low end hardware and still have the option to turn on all the eye candy if your hardware supports it. A recent example is Pragmata that can be played on the switch but also looks worlds better on high end hardware.

Game devs will have to take optimization and scalability seriously for the next few years if they want to make any money at all.

Yeah, the $80 dollar AAA games are presumably going to price enough people out that there's no need to upgrade anyway. 😬

Thank goodness indies are usually more interesting anyway.

Same boat brother! Honestly I haven't found anything yet that my AM4 doesn't crush. Sure someday I'll replace it. Someday.

“60% of gamers have no plans to build a computer for the foreseeable future.” The unspoken part is, “and the hardware manufacturers don’t care”. Maybe they will after the bubble pops, or maybe not.

The ones building consumer hardware probably care. There's only 3 major DRAM manufacturers, but several companies that sell RAM sticks. Those guys aren't gonna be having fun. AMD, nVidia and Intel are making out like bandits from the GPU sales, but the AIBs are most definitely not, since you don't really buy a Sapphire or Gigabyte card for your data center, it'll be direct from nVidia/AMD/Intel for hyperscalers and everyone else buys a complete server from someone like HP or Dell generally.

There are like 10 companies making out big on hardware for AI, but dozens of companies that will be hit hard.

competitor manufacturer

There's Chinese ram that's becoming good. But that doesn't mean Americans will be allowed to buy it.

But really gamers are the worst about consumerism. Nvidia is the worst and gamers keep going back. Steve from Gamer's Nexus had a funny chart in one of his videos a year or so ago. It was a flow chart about gamer spending on hardware showing all the advantages of AMD and Intel in gaming with a big arrow at the bottom that was labeled something like "And then you ignore everything and give all your money to Nvidia."

I try to make it a habit to build a whole new machine when a new AMD socket to accommodate a major memory standard comes out. Way I figure, many people will dump their older hardware, so I can get a bargain on top-shelf stuff of the older standard. So when DDR6 is out, I pick up a 1024gb of DDR5 and a Threadripper of the generation.

While I don't like the FOMO from not adopting the latest platform, my wallet much appreciates the mercy.

I'm at 14 years, with one gpu upgrade to a 970, and I'm just here sacrificing to any god out there at this point. I've become pretty comfortable with indie games, and even a few well optimized games (elden ring, for example, runs pretty well), but when my friends just jumped into subnautica 2, that was a big :(

3-5 was pretty normal for a long time, in general and for myself. But I’m sitting at 7 years now, and idk if I’ll build a new one until there’s some kind of crash in prices. Might upgrade the cpu to a 5700x3d though if AMD does actually make more of those

I used to upgrade every two years. In the last decade though, it's been 3-4 years, because hardware can keep up with new games and tech as they come.

I am glad I bought two PC's in late 2024, though, before billionaires decided they were going to force people to rent PC's for life. I should be set for a while, maybe even as long as we end up waiting for a crash.

there is absolutely zero reason for them to go back to $75/32GB DDR5 kits.

There's enough memory manufacturers that as long as the cartel was successfully busted when I forget which government took action against them last year, that they should start competing on price again as soon as demand re-normalizes

I built mine in 2015 and planned to upgrade 10 years later but I was waiting for a better CPU than Zen 5's X3D lineup (read: either more cores or dual die cache), then the RAM situation happened. This is how I'm playing games on an Intel 4770k in 2026.

Same. Steam deck completely changed the way I game. I have no interest in a gaming desktop anymore. Haven't turned my desktop on in over a year.

why bother if that’s the case?

I always understood part of the appeal of building your own being that you could go PC of Theseus on it and upgrade parts gradually over time, rather than having to drop $1,500-$2,000 all in one go.

Makes me think why between 1990 and 2005 felt like a great time for PC gaming, as the hardware then wasn't demanding, and the games were great during their time despite being sprite-based.

There's a part of me that's with you on that, but there's a slightly larger part that knows computer bits can lose the magic smoke at any time and need to be replaced. I'm still amazed that my original HDD and SSD from 14 years ago are up and running without any apparent issues.

It is still a metric of whether we're aspiring to build a pc or not. I have been meaning to build a new PC for years. Now I have entirely shelved those plans. I wish I hadn't procrastinated :(

That i7 sounds like my system. Fyi if you get tired of the hdd boot they make an m2 pcie card that works pretty good

Yep, I built my PC in 2018 as well.

Thanks to the incredible life of the AM4 socket, I managed to upgrade CPUs 3 years ago, and upgraded my GPU 2 years ago.

Between AAA gaming becoming garbage, and the AInflation of components and artificial scarcity, I probably wont upgrade/build new again for at least 5-7 years short of catastrophic failure. . . assuming I am even allowed to by that point, with how they are seemingly trying to push consumers out of the market.

Steam Deck

I just bought a PS5 Pro. Easy. I’m so over the pc gaming world. I also have a Mac for the games that work there, like city builders and strategy games.

Ive been looking into this stuff. They all have weird names and benchmarks / gaming reviews take forever research

For me "too much" was a long time ago. The price of graphics cards went insane at some point and it stopped being worth it. The last time I bought a graphics card new was in 2009 and that cost me, adjusted for inflation, £220 (Why do I still have the receipt..?). It was an nVidia GTX 260 and at the time was a fairly decent midrange card. Looking at graphics card pricing now, uh, nope, that wouldn't buy me anything comparable - it looks like we're talking ~£380 for midrange stuff, so a ~70% increase in price.

Whilst obviously the hardware is a lot more capable now than it was then, the amount of enjoyment I get out of gaming hasn't gone up. If anything I enjoy gaming less now than I did then, although that's more due to me getting older.

I'm constantly baffled as to how anyone can justify the cost of a decent gaming PC these days.

I just straight up refuse to play games running on UE5

I still feel like my 2070 is largely overkill. If GPU prices become reasonable I may consider an xx50/60 or equivalent if it's a moderate improvement and lower power consumption.

Who said every 2 years tho?

I'm planning to build within the next 2 years because my GPU came out in 2020 and my CPU in 2019. So I'm part of that 40%.

I was going to build a new rig last year since I use it for work more than gaming and could use a faster CPU and more RAM, but I think we all know why I'm postponing.

I think most of the 40% will be people whose setup was already getting old and then the goddamn LLM-induced RAM crisis hit.

For those people consumerism is the hobby. They don't get anything by buying new computer every 2 years, other than the act of buying itself. For wast majority of gamers the cycle is closer to 8-10 years. Personally, I'm playing on a laptop that I bought in 2020 and it runs everything I want it to run no problem, and I'm planning to change it only when it breaks irreparably.

I honestly can't remember the last time I played a game that couldn't be played on a potato. No AAA games have interested me in years

Don't count out us cheap bastards. I love buying used gear. I don't play games on them, I just run my own stuff. Local llms home servers for media and such.

Of course with proxmox, my need for multiple devices has shrunk considerably. I'd be happy if I could get an old mining rig with a few midrange gpus in them. I'd rather run my own llm than pay a premium for a subscription. I can have it run my home automation and use it for filthy sexy chat bots. Could also use them for coding agents.

If you're dumping 2-3 year old nvidia hardware, I'm buying.

They really want to put us on hardware as a service. Eventually you won’t be able to buy hardware, digital ownership will be eroded, and you’ll pay more for it than if we’d kept the hardware market alive. Better to just cut the cord now and if it doesn’t run on your old pc just don’t run it. Don’t pay for streaming services.