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Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI

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Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI

#271

Post by oyashirochama »

iririririr wrote: post #267
wil421 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can buy server boards that don’t require loud fans. If you’re buying used server gear from a datacenter then it will be like what you said. I have a 4U NAS with a supermicro board and an i3 chip with 6 WD Red NAS drives and it’s very quiet. The chassis came without fans so I installed the brand I like.

no, you definitely cannot. you probably have a consumer board in a 4u case

Tell my youve never owned a supermicro board without telling me. They support regular 80mm/90mm Noctua and function just fine. There's specific supermicro mounts for me.

Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI

#272

Post by stuartq »

hx8 wrote: post #239
c7b wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contrary take: I believe we will see an expanded market for capable PCs that can be sanely put in a living space. By extension of the gaming PC niche to local AI. Both NVidia and AMD are developing product lines in that direction (DGX Spark, Ryzen AI Max). And Linux will be more prominent than ever, due to several independent reasons: MS dropping the ball hard on Windows, SteamOS making Linux attractive for gamers, '…

Great take, but if the market is expanding for capable PCs why are motherboard sales decreasing?

According to the article, because components are really expensive right now, particularly RAM and storage.

Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI

#274

Post by jjav »

craftkiller wrote: post #158
hx8 wrote: post #59

PC is the last major open platform. While other platforms like Android and becoming less open, PC in general is becoming more open than it's been in a long time as heavy MacOS/Android/iOS competition is creating a focus on open standards and all-time high strong Linux support gives people a place to land and tinker/hack to their heart's content. I think we will see an abandonment of consumer grade PC components and i…

> I already have home sever rack, and would recommend it for other people. I just want to warn people who haven't heard server-grade hardware in-person before: this is only for people who can put a server rack somewhere unpopulated like a garage or basement. Servers will make you think "wow, leafblowers sure are quiet". They are not suitable for apartment dwellers such as myself. When I was setting up my 1U before sh…

You can make those rackmounted servers as loud or as quiet as you like. For home, optimize quiet (and low power consumption).

Even though my server rack is in the garage I try to keep it quiet. A couple of them are fanless Atom-based and others have fans but they are built to be quiet. If you need hardware that generates a lot of heat, go with 4U for large fans that spin slow, thus low noise.

The "wow, leafblowers sure are quiet" happens when you stuff a lot of heat generation into a 1U chassis that then requires lots of tiny fans running at full speed. Those you don't want at home! But it is easy to avoid. Data centers do this to maximize density, but that's unlikely to matter at home.

Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI

#275

Post by MrDOS »

b00ty4breakfast wrote: post #167
hx8 wrote: post #59

PC is the last major open platform. While other platforms like Android and becoming less open, PC in general is becoming more open than it's been in a long time as heavy MacOS/Android/iOS competition is creating a focus on open standards and all-time high strong Linux support gives people a place to land and tinker/hack to their heart's content. I think we will see an abandonment of consumer grade PC components and i…

Assuming this trend continues, I think people are going to start re-using older hardware rather than turning to server-grade hardware (which is often not convenient for the average residential situation). At least, that's what I hope happens. What will probably happen is people will continue to migrate away from the PC platform and towards closed platforms for the convenience, if history is any indication.

I think this is already happening, sort of. At least, people are hanging onto their older-but-not-yet-old components for much longer than they used to. I recently tried to build a NAS from eBay parts, and I was surprised to find that the newest stuff affordably available was 6th/7th generation Intel Core parts (retailed 2016/2017). I think people are trying to offload these CPUs in particular because they can't run an unmodified Windows 11 installation (no firmware TPM 2.0 implementation, and the corresponding consumer motherboards typically didn't have a discrete TPM module, either, if they had an LPC bus connector at all). Very little (reasonably-priced) availability of similar-aged Ryzen CPUs (which have firmware TPM support) or newer Intel CPUs.

Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI

#276

Post by iamnothere »

the__alchemist wrote: post #240
Aurornis wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Future proofing is an expensive way to pay for features you don't need and will probably never use. It's smarter to buy a cheap motherboard that meets your needs now. If in the future you find the need for USB4 or some other feature, upgrade the motherboard. More often than not, builders will try to future proof for eventualities that don't arrive before it's time to upgrade to the next CPU socket anyway. There are a…

It's a gamble. I take the opposite mindset now; scarcity mindset. "$1600 is too much for a video card" - me a few years ago on not buying an RTX4090 from nvidia's website. "I only need 32Gb of RAM. If I want more later, I'll just updgrade" - Me a year ago. Both mistakes, with hindsight. I will always future proof from here on out.

I future proofed by stepping back to high end components from last generation (except for GPU). My memory speed is slightly lower, but I have 32 cores and 128 GB ECC RAM on 4 channels. I doubt I will need to upgrade this thing any time soon for my typical use cases.

Note that this was before the RAM shortage, but I bet you could still do this now and save a little versus mid-tier current gen gear.

Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI

#277

Post by cullenking »

Anecdata to add to the pile...I pulled three 1u epyc gen2 servers from my production rack 1.5 years ago and replaced them with lower power alternatives for a production storage cluster. I didn't need the extra CPUs for app server stuff so they sat in my house for a while. Fast forward 1.5 years and it was making sense to upgrade some app servers to new gen stuff, get a bump in frequency and core count...when i went to spec some new servers, my normal $15k - $20k build was $55k.

Instead, I hittup ebay, got six used gen3 processors, found a "good deal" on a couple tb of new ram (still insanely expensive), and came out with the same overall horsepower for a total of $20k instead of $110k.

I know this is about consumer desktop, but seeing the comments about upgrading old hardware caused me to chime in. This is happening in the production/enterprise level in some segments.

Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI

#278

Post by gck1 »

craftkiller wrote: post #158
hx8 wrote: post #59

PC is the last major open platform. While other platforms like Android and becoming less open, PC in general is becoming more open than it's been in a long time as heavy MacOS/Android/iOS competition is creating a focus on open standards and all-time high strong Linux support gives people a place to land and tinker/hack to their heart's content. I think we will see an abandonment of consumer grade PC components and i…

> I already have home sever rack, and would recommend it for other people. I just want to warn people who haven't heard server-grade hardware in-person before: this is only for people who can put a server rack somewhere unpopulated like a garage or basement. Servers will make you think "wow, leafblowers sure are quiet". They are not suitable for apartment dwellers such as myself. When I was setting up my 1U before sh…

I sit next to my 4U server with all enterprise components apart from fans - these are consumer grade.

I had to mod the chassis slightly (with just pliers, tape and random inserts) to fit these fans in there, and add fans in front to push the air in. The PSU that came with it was obnoxiously loud, but thankfully, Supermicro has a quiet version that I can't even hear. Even if SM didn't have this PSU, I could have easily modified the PSU and fit some noctuas in there without any issue or safety concerns - like I did with my enterprise grade Mikrotik switch that also had obnoxious fans by default.

I even have an enterprise grade UPS that is dead silent when it's not running on battery power (I swapped the fans there too).

I essentially try to buy enterprise gear whenever possible. Not only is it usually much better than the consumer alternative, but it also is frequently much cheaper too because of second hand market. Before AI sucked the soul out of the hardware market in general, you could have bought enterprise SSDs that had life expectancy - TBW - measured in petabytes, and MTFB - practically never - for half the price of the top consumer SSD that had TBW measured in tens of TB and MFTB of yesterday.

And the entire rack is just slightly more louder than the PC I was using.

The only consumer grade computer at my home is my MacBook and my phone.

Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI

#279

Post by ButyTh0 »

ericd wrote: post #254
donmcronald wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might just be frustrated young people. They're getting squeezed real hard by a system that was set up to put them on an impossible trajectory before they were even born. You can see the divide everywhere. People with lots of money think supply and demand, congestion pricing, etc. are great tools because it doesn't impact them at all compared to people on the bottom. Those are only good solutions if you're not the…

I think it’s probably mostly what your sibling comment said, it’s very cheap to sow division and discord now. I get what you’re saying, and there definitely are people who are angry about the US slipping, and standards of living reverting to the mean a bit, and looking to blame someone. The True Believer came out in the aftermath of WW2 and tried to analyze why it happened, and laid out that the most dangerous group…

[flagged]

Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI

#280

Post by danparsonson »

lioeters wrote: post #136
groby_b wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cannot be fully free if you're attached to physical goods. It may sound like pseudo-Buddhist claptrap, but it's also true. Or, I suppose, Fight Club claptrap. It's still true. The choice is "do you want to participate in society, its benefits and drawbacks". You can't have only one side of that.

The first rule of Buddhist Fight Club is that attachment causes suffering.

You're not supposed to talk about it!
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