They should try releasing one with a futuristic space-age design and flashing rainbow lights. Maybe give it a name like HARDTEK and put some random techy shapes all over it.
Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI
311–320 of 364 posts
Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI
#312"fueled by AI"
Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
The PCIe lanes are the worst. You have x16 slots that run x1, you need to check slots with m.2 to make sure an x8 doesn't become x4 if you insert storage. Wait if I plug something into the thunderbolt port my 10g network card runs at half speed? Obviously these are actual physical limitation from PCIe lane counts, but it makes it impossible to search. Just painfull.
They exist to partition capability so that enterprises can’t connect all of their peripherals and some ECC memory to get the same functionality for 1/10 the price. It’s not a physical limitation.
Obviously market tiering is part of it and you can play tricks with north and south bridge and pcie switches (which adds cost), but a ryzen board that advertises a pcie 5.0 x16 gpu slot and 5.0 x4 m2 slot only has 4 lanes left to work with from the cpu (i.e the cpus only have 24 usable lanes). Which while you can play with generations to get more lanes it's effectively still 16gb/s. That needs to cover network, extra m2 slots, usbs, as well as the extra PCIe slots.
I don't mind having to work within those physical limits but I do want to be able to search for boards that support N components. i.e 1x 4.0x8, 2x 3.0x8, 4x 5.0x4 . But the best you can search for is physical sizes of pcie slots and then dive into a spec sheet for each one, only to find that the 6 x16 slots only have 1.0x1 of bandwidth each.
Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Kind of a random aside, but I never realized how obnoxious LEDs were until I got a studio apartment and started sleeping in the same room as my homelab / workstation / networking hardware. Electrical tape saved me, but wow. You sure can produce a lot of light with a milliwatt of electricity :) (And yes, my workstation has a clear case and LED RAM. Yes, I'm an idiot. Whenever Windows applies an update late at night, I…
I like to put a little red wax over LEDs (at least, ones that I don’t touch). That way you can still see them, but they are dimmer, and the red tint makes the light less annoying at night.
Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI
#315Motherboards used to be $100, $200 for the high end. Now they want $300+, ram is crazy, storage, video cards, etc. I'm not surprised sales for these components is hitting a wall.
I just priced out a new motherboard for $130.
Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
At current prices, Chinese companies could even produce everything possible (~anything but current gen CPUs and GPUs) on slightly older nodes and make a stonking profit while lowering market prices.
China is also short on supply... Capex for these are planned years ahead and just not flexible enough to deal with the supply squeeze right now.
I'm not sure that's going to change unless the LLM stuff slumps. Chip makers get burned every few decades by building boom-time capacity that comes online just after the crash. They're going to be reluctant to make big capex spends unless they think the demand is durable.
Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hobbyist equipment is still relatively cheap. You can get previous-gen hardware for formerly current-gen prices, you can run lots of “hobbyist” software on low RAM and no GPU. It’s bad, but it’s not “literally own nothing”.
Yeah, I'm not sure that fewer people will own computers, I do think people will shift to much longer upgrade cycles.
Or live with lower specs. You can still get a Chromebook for $200 and install Xubuntu on it. I did that, and it's perfect for video conferencing and web surfing. You certainly can't play CoD on it, but even if you're looking to play games there are some older games that run on it just fine.
Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
After the recent run-up, where are prices on a per-performance basis? Back to 2019? Computers were incredibly more expensive when I was growing up. People bought them anyway. Is a computer that lasts 5-8 really productive years (and is still serviceable for another 5-7) and costs $1500 really a deal-breaker just because it was $1000 and on sale for $850 a year ago? Even if it doubled again, it still doesn’t price nor…
I think your idea of what "normal people" can afford is a bit off. Normal people aren't buying $1500 computers. And they definitely aren't buying $3000 computers.
People spend $1500 on phones. I'd be surprised if they weren't willing to spend that on computers if they see a need.
But from what I can see a lot of people aren't really interested in PCs. Most of the non-techie, non-gamer people I know do everything on mobile.
Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Motherboards used to be $100, $200 for the high end. Now they want $300+ Entry level motherboards are still $100. $300+ is a very high end motherboard. The existence of very high end products is confusing because it can give the impression that you have to buy a $300 motherboard because it exists. If you compare features side by side you're rarely missing anything important for the entry level motherboards. Some pe…
If you’re dropping that kind of cash, you definitely want to future proof it and not go with the budget lastgen motherboards.
I would only agree if you already plan on doing major hardware upgrades within like 3 years at the latest. Past that and you will inevitably be missing new features that will be shipping even on budget hardware and won't be saving on anything.
Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI
#320PC 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 had exactly this problem, 1U server that sounded like a 747 taking off downwind. I solved it by getting a mini-PC that had more processing power than the eBayed 1U server (I just looked up what was available in terms of CPUs and got the best bang per buck, an 8C16T AMD CPU) and that runs essentially silent except when it's under load - they're designed for low-power/silent operation. If you're running your server at 100% load 24/7 then this isn't for you, but for home "server" use it was ideal.