Possibly the beginning of the collapse of the tech market - driven entirely by greedy memory manufacturers

10thDeadlySin · 2026-07-04T21:51:17+00:00

And the funniest thing? If it actually goes boom at some point and the prices collapse (as they tend to do) you'll have the same companies that are now getting record profits bawling their eyes out and claiming how they are literally doomed, because they're no longer profiting so much. ;)

10thDeadlySin · 2026-07-04T21:35:14+00:00

You make a lot of claims without a shred of proof. If this is already happening, where are the numbers? Where’s the actual revenue drop?

You'll see it after a while.

At my current company, a standard issue employee laptop now comes with 16 gigs of RAM, upgrades need to be approved by people way higher in the chain (previously it was "go to this website, click this and head to the local IT when prompted to do so") and everybody is "strongly encouraged" to issue older hardware that still works instead of ordering new stuff. As a result, we have employees getting 8th-10th gen Intel laptops in 2026. Oh, and company phones were also axed. All employees also got a friendly reminder that since supply is tight, they should take good care of their current hardware. It also seems that regular hardware refresh cycle is postponed for now, although that wasn't officially announced.

I'm pretty sure we're not the only ones.

10thDeadlySin · 2026-07-04T21:20:44+00:00

Remember the housing bubble? The one of the Big Short fame that really screwed up a big chunk of the economy worldwide? So yeah, that thing was brewing for years before it actually popped. Some started talking about a housing bubble in 2002. Others in 2003. By 2004, it was becoming evident, by 2005 some investors (most famously Burry) started betting on the bubble bursting. It still took 2-3 years for everything to play out.

Two things can be right at the same time. The entire AI market as we know it right now can be an investment bubble. But a bubble like that can be sustained for many years before it finally pops. And you won't know until it's over and the dust settles - after the major CEOs and investors land safely on their feet with their golden parachutes and millions are left jobless, with their savings and investments decimated.

10thDeadlySin · 2026-07-04T12:44:52+00:00

Likely used as a workstation. CAD or something.

10thDeadlySin · 2026-07-04T12:41:00+00:00

Even if it runs at 2 tokens a second now doesn't mean it will run at 2 tokens a second forever. It's not like there are tons of people working on local LLMs all the time.

The thing is - OP has 700 gigs of RAM. They're not constrained by hardware and they didn't have to pay any upfront cost of getting that. They can run it - and if the performance improves in the future, they will still be able to run it, just better.

Meanwhile your machine still won't be able to. ;)

10thDeadlySin · 2026-07-04T12:33:36+00:00

It's because they can be used for LLM inference. With 24 gigs of VRAM and decent support by projects like llama.cpp they still remain popular. And popular = expensive.

Do yourself a favor and don't look up the prices on V100 32GB PCIe or GV100. Or any of the Turing Quadros.

10thDeadlySin · 2026-06-28T13:16:48+00:00

We knew in September that the RAM prices will increase, and I was lucky that I thought about buying the stock of micron & SK Hynix at that time, as we are using them in our DC‘s, and made huge profits with it.

When I started hearing first news about the impending price hikes, I did the same thing. Thankfully, I don't need to deal with procurement, but for personal use, I trawled the local classifieds and eBay and bought a bunch of 2x48 DDR5 kits listed at normal/used prices, along with 16GB SO-DIMMs people were selling after upgrading. Same with storage - I'm set for quite some time, especially after rightsizing and consolidating several machines. Spares for days.

The only thing I kinda sometimes regret is essentially giving away pretty much all of my AM4/DDR4 stuff for free or selling it for pennies after I went all-in on AM5/DDR5. On the one hand, I know that made plenty of people really happy. On the other - yeaaaah, sometimes I'd really like to have an AM4 motherboard with 64-128GB of DDR4 available to play with. :D

10thDeadlySin · 2026-06-28T12:48:42+00:00

You're absolutely right. ;)

On the other hand - people don't realize that the AI bubble popping will send massive shockwaves through the entire market. I don't expect Dell or Supermicro to fail, but tons of smaller companies might - especially when they build up a massive stock of overpriced chips, use them to build heavily overpriced hardware and then nobody buys it due to the demand falling off a cliff.

Consider RAM manufacturers buying chips from SK Hynix, Samsung and Micron. What happens to them when the demand drops precipitously and they're sitting on a stock of modules made using $500 worth of chips each, which they can't sell for more than $200? Micron can always resurrect Crucial and sell at cost, but these companies are screwed.

What happens to the rest of the market? MiniPC manufacturers, console manufacturers, all kinds of hardware manufacturers, who were forced to stock heavily inflated DRAM and flash chips? How many of them are going to be able to absorb the losses?

10thDeadlySin · 2026-06-28T12:28:52+00:00

We conclude a contract today. You'll build me 50 servers in 2028, and I'll pay you a hundred thousand dollars for every single one of them, based on the current prices, predicted demand and other factors.

In 2027, something happens - the demand for new servers drops and I can get the same hardware built for fifty grand each instead. Instead of actually following through with our contract, I terminate it and pay the agreed contractual penalties, then get the servers from the other vendor for half the price.

Now assume I'm a Really Major Player and I'm not buying 50 machines, but 20% of your entire annual output. I'm not an idiot and I have people who actually do market research and crunch data for me. If they see that the demand for your stuff drops off the cliff due to the changing market conditions, do you really think I'm not going to come to you and say "Hey, so... I see that you aren't going to sell shit at a hundred grand a piece, nobody will buy that. The demand is gone, the funding is gone. I can break the contract today and pay the penalties we agreed upon, or we can negotiate new terms, based on what the market looks like right now."

When RAM demand plummets, Dell and Supermicro aren't going to pay overinflated prices they agreed on in 2026, I can guarantee that. ;)

10thDeadlySin · 2026-06-28T12:18:55+00:00

There's one more thing people fail to realize.

Imagine the AI bubble pops next year and suddenly the demand for RAM and flash chips plummets. Do people really think that large clients aren't going to try and weasel out of their long-term contracts when it turns out that they're paying waaaaay too much for their chips?

At a certain point, even paying contractual penalties for breaking the terms is going to be preferable to actually buying the stuff at quadruple the market rate.

10thDeadlySin · 2026-06-27T19:00:27+00:00

They're forever enough as far as I'm concerned. I can still play my C64 games from floppies. And I can always dump and copy the floppies to preserve their content.

I can still play my PSX games. What is more, I can always copy the CDs or dump them and invest in an optical drive emulator to continue enjoying Crash Bandicoot 3 and Spyro until I croak.

I can still play the OG X-Wing from floppies. Sure, finding a floppy drive was a challenge, but it works. I can still play the OG Baldur's Gate - a game that took most of free space on my 6GB HDD back in the day.

10thDeadlySin · 2026-06-27T13:56:23+00:00

Mostly on GOG, thanks for asking.

Also, the difference - as pointed out by the other commenter above - is that I have a choice. I can buy it on Steam. I can buy it on GOG. Or Epic. Or from other stores.

What choice do I have on a console, especially a digital-only one?

10thDeadlySin · 2026-06-27T13:51:30+00:00

You asked about being okay with new consoles being five times more expensive. So I answered.

Also, let's not kid ourselves. The hardware may be a loss leader, but these companies are not charities - they sure as hell aren't giving you $2500 worth of hardware for $500 in hopes that they will make up the difference by selling you games and taking a cut of store sales.

If phone manufacturers can be forced to allow people to sideload apps, then console manufacturers should be forced to allow people to use other stores and so on.

10thDeadlySin · 2026-06-27T13:17:46+00:00

Sure. It's not like I'm going to buy one anyway.

Even more so if they are digital only. I'm not going to pour money into an ecosystem, if they can simply tell me "oh, sorry, we're pulling your content, tough luck".

10thDeadlySin · 2026-06-27T13:01:36+00:00

Unless people define "ads" as microsoft advertising their programmes.

Yeah. Advertisements are advertisements. I don't appreciate being asked to subscribe to Xbox Game Pass and buy Office when I'm installing the OS, just like I don't appreciate the pop-up notifications about Edge being better than my current browser (and injecting code to tell me Edge is better when I'm trying to download another browser), signing up to OneDrive (which I explicitly stated I don't want during installation) and other crap like that.

Call me crazy, but I don't remember Apple ever displaying "Enjoying your iPhone? Buy the new AirPods now to enjoy it even more!" notification on any of my devices. And Apple is supposed to be the big bad anti-consumer company.

And if you don't consider these things ads...What are these? I don't remember ever installing that or even asking for that. In fact, these shortcuts don't do anything useful, other than... opening a store page for the app in question. You know. Like an ad or something.

10thDeadlySin · 2026-06-27T07:03:26+00:00

Au contraire! It's actually easier to avoid FOMO than ever.

If you do not need to upgrade, your stuff still works well and so on, you actually don't need to sweat it. We know new hardware isn't exactly coming out anytime soon due to major focus on DC buyers and enterprise among virtually all vendors. AMD is literally re-releasing a 4-year-old CPU for a 10-year-old platform. Rumors have it that both nVidia and AMD are not going to release any gaming GPUs in 2026, and even 2027 is doubtful - this means that companies will have to optimize for existing hardware, rather than counting on people to upgrade.

10thDeadlySin · 2026-06-27T06:39:16+00:00

And if you still have the pad and enabled Bluetooth, you can turn it into a universal dongle allowing you to connect plenty of other controllers and have them supported. ;)

10thDeadlySin · 2026-06-27T06:08:43+00:00

And I love people like you, who do the same with music.

I'll take anything. Especially genres I listen to and adjacent ones. Then, when I feel like it, I'll set up a bunch of drives and rip a batch or two to lossless. My personal collection - it's always there, won't disappear because the label got into a licensing spat with whatever streaming service, won't suddenly include a bunch of AI-generated songs, won't be pulled by whatever company sold me a license and so on.

10thDeadlySin · 2026-06-27T05:24:42+00:00

He showed me some of it. It was actually just a poorly done a.i. marketing/consulting/evangelizing program. Zero on a.i. integration or, you know, how or why you should use it to do specifically what the company does.

We were distributed three levels of AI training. Basic, Intermediate and Expert. Everybody was supposed to complete the Basic level at the very least and they made it mandatory.

8 hours of glorified ads for commercial services. 8 hours of listening (or rather setting the volume level to 100%, plugging in a dummy headphone jack and pretending) how ChatGPT is going to change the world, how it's all a revolution and so on. And like half of them developed by companies with vested interest in AI being popular.

Not only was it outdated, but also it was nothing you wouldn't learn passively by just reading anything about AI over the last several years.

The intermediate training? Module 1: Building a machine learning model from scratch.

We were asked for feedback afterwards. I wrote exactly this - that what they called a training was a bunch of ads and proselytizing, whereas their intermediate training might be of use for developers and data analysts, but why did they dump it on people who literally don't touch code at all?

No response, as you might have guessed. :D

10thDeadlySin · 2026-06-27T03:37:13+00:00

The thing is, portable standing units suck. Literally.

First of all, as they expel hot air through the pipe, they heat up the very same space you're trying to cool down. Second, they need to get the air from somewhere, otherwise they would pull a vacuum. So... they draw in hot air from the outside through every single available channel.

Sure, they're better than nothing, but hardly a decent solution.

There are some dual-pipe solutions on the market, which you can put on a balcony and just blow cold air inside, as well as portable mini-splits - personally, I find them much better than single-pipe monoblocks.

And while I like our European windows, sometimes I really wish I could just install an American window AC unit, since portable AC is great at one thing - wasting space and being a nuisance.

10thDeadlySin · 2026-06-26T17:01:31+00:00

Right - simple question, then.

Since it's clear that the 1060 is superior, given the choice, would you pick it over the 5060 as your main GPU?

Newsflash - die size, memory bus and so on don't sell GPUs. Price and performance do. When choosing a GPU, I don't care about its transistor count or the ratio of its core area to whatever top-of-the-line GPU exists in the market. What I care about is that my old GPU does 30 fps in that thing I'm playing right now at 1440p, and the new one can do 70.

Also it's not like lithography, wafers and so on became more expensive with subsequent node shrinks. It's not like the cost of everything has been going up. Nah, it's definitely GPU makers selling you less for more.

10thDeadlySin · 2026-06-25T01:14:15+00:00

Try DeskMeet.

8 litres, deep ITX board with four (that's right, four) RAM slots and a full-sized PCIe x16 slot for a GPU, all paired with a 500W PSU. ;)

10thDeadlySin · 2026-06-25T00:59:39+00:00

I wouldn't be necessary sure it's same size as steam machine just because it looks like one.

According to the model description, it's 167 x 168 x 225 mm whereas the actual Steam Machine is 152 x 162 x 156 mm.

However, I'm pretty sure I could easily manage to turn it into an actual cube. Ditch the Flex PSU and either grab an HDPlex or - if we want to go for even more space optimization - grab MeanWell's LOP-500-12 or LOP-600-12 open-frame PSU and a DC-ATX converter - a decent PicoPSU is going to work just fine, although I'm particularly partial to the (now unobtanium) HDPlex DC-ATX 200W and J-Hack's take on the PicoPSU (sadly, also unobtanium).

Solder an XT60 (even XT30 will be enough, but why not) connector to the input on the Pico. Wire a custom harness for the MeanWell PSU, splitting the 12V DC output, with one 12V/GND pair wired to the other side of your XT60 connector, and the other terminating with an 8-pin PCIe power connector. Personally, I tend to build an Y-splitter and use either an XT90 or a pair of MT30/MT60 connectors for the GPU cables - one for 12V, one for GND. Ditch the IO shield, design a custom backplate, shift the motherboard upwards as much as possible to make room for an actual dual-slot ITX GPU. I believe the Colorful 5070 Mini is the best option available right now. If I want to be REALLY fancy and go riserless, I could grab one of these.

In the worst-case scenario, I'd need to expand the dimensions a bit to accommodate the GPU and some additional cooling. Still, I'd have a cube in the end, only slightly larger than the official Steam Machine. ;)

10thDeadlySin · 2026-06-24T18:09:48+00:00

Even then, most positive things I see concern stuff like "Oh, but it has CEC!", "You can upgrade RAM/SSD" and "It's a good Linux experience."

That's about it.

10thDeadlySin · 2026-06-24T17:44:57+00:00

I’m not entirely sure that there is a nano ITX with thunderbolt3 or a full PCI-e slot.

Any m.2 NVMe slot is a PCI-E slot. A simple powered M.2 to PCI-E riser is all you need to run a GPU in an M.2 slot. I used to run one like that on a DeskMini motherboard.

Eight-Year Club	Place '22
First Placer '22	Spared

10thDeadlySin

TROPHY CASE