Predictions

 In the middle of December I emailed my good buddy out in Nova Scotia and told him this :

"At this festive time of the year I should let you know of something that has been festering for the last month or so, perhaps a "too late" timely comment, which may still be in time, depending on which way you see it. A little background, something that has not affected you and would never have, during the covid years video cards, GPUs, increased dramatically in price because of a perfect storm of high demand and for many reasons, supply issues. They went up 200% to 300% and the cynical amongst us acknowledged that the industry was taking advantage, of course, greed was also a factor with consumers. This would not have been on your radar because of your computing requirements.

Fast forward to a chilling announcement just a few weeks ago from Micron, they announced that they are exiting the consumer market for ram, specifically modern ram like DDR4 and DDR5. The big three memory companies are Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix, basically those three supply most of the planet's memory products, which is a factor in absolutely everything, everything. What Micron has done, and the other two companies will surely follow, have shifted from consumer products to chasing high bandwidth HBM customers, mainly data centres, bitcoin conglomerates, AI processing plants, all of which are seeing trillions of dollars of governmental funding. 

The effect of the announcement on the 3rd December has caused memory products to spike 300% or more in the consumer market, a budget-friendly 32GB kit of DDR5 in September would have been $95 and today is around $440, this being is seen across all memory products and I consider will be irreversible by February when Micron (and probably the others) will pull the plug. I say memory products because it will affect SSD drives, GPU prices and the sinister aspect is that everything that uses silicon will be affected by this "AI Squeeze" which is planes, trains and automobiles, dishwashers, consumer electronics, everything.

So, back to my point. If you think you will be in the market for a new computer at some point in 2026 or 2027 you should consider that this is a sweet spot to buy existing inventory from a company like Dell Refurbished." 

At that point I linked him to a Dell Precision 5820 Tower workstation, at the time the price was $419 that was a screaming deal, the workstation class machines exceptional in specifications, it was an "A" condition machine, they had 31 units left and I was tempted to buy one myself.  Windows 11 Pro, 16GB DDR4, 11th generation Intel, 500GB SSD. When you added tax and shipping, the workstation was $500 which was a great price.

Two weeks later, they have none.

Sure, they will have more, I hope, but it is a sign that "hot cakes" need to be bought. If I think this way, all the other lemmings will be thinking the same way, prices will rocket in 2026 and there will be no going back, that is the way the market works, in my tiny world, used DDR4 prices have gone up a lot in the last month, that is because the word is out, sellers are selling for more, because buyers are paying more. 

The question is, this inflationary process, is it real?

Wheeling and Dealing and the price of fish.

It would be nice to have a small heated workshop in these winter months, but I have to put up with the vastness of the garage and my tiny computer bench, that is my lot in life I suppose, an old curmudgeon, sore joints and a reliance on alcohol, cold beverages and a cold garage but busy things to do and those RAM prices going through the roof and people on the internet losing their minds about computer prices, again. I like to add things to the blog to remind me of what I was up to at a certain time, I do not track computer builds in spreadsheets any more although perhaps I should have with this one.

This build is for an MSI Z370-A Pro with an i3-8100 at 3.60 GHz with 16GB DDR4 and an ASUS GTX 1060 GPU with 3GB. There have been wheelings and dealings with the parts. I bought a 6th generation computer for $100 and sold the motherboard and cpu for $60 and the power hungry Zotac GTX 1070 that came with it for $110. The 8th or perhaps 9th generation MSI motherboard, cpu and cooler, along with another 8GB DDR4 were $80. The 6th gen computer had come with a 2.50" 500GB SSD and most recently the GTX 1060 was a $50 deal on Marketplace on New Years Eve. Therefore, this computer has cost me $60 so far, plus that little 250GB M.2 drive which was $30.16 from eBay. Total is $90.16 however, technically that 8GB extra DDR4 is worth $20 so we can say $70.16 and if I decide to not use the M.2 and use the larger "free" SSD instead, that will drop to $40

Forty bucks!

I found a few spreadsheets from over twenty-eight years ago detailing a computer upgrade I did for a buddy of mine, at the time 16MB (Megabytes) of 72 pin fast page RAM were $51.49 including tax and I consider that was probably a bargain price back then. The industry is up in arms at the moment with the apparent impact of the AI data centres and Crypto industries inflating the price of DDR5 and consequentially, DDR4 because of big greedy ram manufacturers opting for easy printed government money and throwing consumers to the wolves, however, based on that $51.49 which worked out at $3.22 a megabyte, that "free" 8GB stick of DDR4 represents 8192MB or approximately $26362.88 in 1997 value, who says things have gone up? 

An 8GB stick of DDR5 is currently valued at $138.88 and more on Amazon so I don't see what all the fuss is about...

MONSTER

I lurk around Facebook Marketplace looking for things that I don't need and often find exactly that, sometimes those things are so cheap that no form of logic will divert me from buying the item, internal discussions about do I need it, what would I do with it, can I resist it? with all of them falling on deaf ears, I have to have it, perhaps for only a short time, but it must be purchased.

This is one of the latest things and it is a monster tower case, not too old at all, the chap said he bought it a year ago, and it looks like this :

It is the biggest computer case I have ever owned and I have no idea what I wanted it for, besides the ridiculous price, it is so tall it will not fit under my work bench where all the other tower cases are stored, and I have had a couple of massive cases under there. I will need a good cleaning session before I do anything with it, time to fire up the compressor and blow the dust bunnies out of it.

What does $50 buy you nowadays? 

Phanteks Enthoo Pro 2 ($279.99) with Corsair RM850x PSU ($209.99) and 7 Noctua NF-P14S PWM fans ($136.85) and a "Be-Quiet" Dark Rock Pro cooler ($119.00) which all add up to $746.69 before tax which is $836.29 total.

Fifty bucks!

I might consider updating my current computer and this may go under my computer desk if it fits, so I may swap out the innards of my games machine and just run one or three of those whisper quiet 140mm Noctua fans, it will be a big and mostly silent computer if it does fit and will become a lifetime case unless I become too feeble to carry it. It may even be an option to upgrade to an AMD Threadripper 4 to go with that cooler, let me take a look at how much one of those would cost along with motherboard and ram...

<time passes>

...ok, maybe not.

Another Birthday, more stuff.

I am happy to buy myself something on my birthday each year, although I know I am in the habit of buying something at every moment I wish all year if I want a quick retail fix nowadays I just go out, or sit on my arse with Amazon and buy something online, but as an experiment, I bought one of these this year and waited the few days for the "big sixty-eight" to compare it to everything else that has gone under the bridge with technology over the wee while.

I really do like my numerous power banks, mainly as they do dovetail nicely into my weakening mind as time goes by, providing a worry free stop gap between forgetting to charge my phone before a day out on the road, and I forget to charge my phone a lot, they will also provide a battery source for anything USB and so they really do come in handy.

This thing is something else though, an order of magnitude more, it will do all those things but of course, is no longer portable like the little cigarette package sized power banks, this thing must have a reason to exist and I'm going to investigate why. I understand that I will need to be a little scientific about my studies and come to some conclusions about if this is of any use whatsoever, but it will be a little fun over the next month or so, will make sure I have it fully charged for the next power cut.

This first day, I boiled water two different ways using the built in inverter, charged my iPhone, Android tablet and iPad and as you can see ended up using 61% of a full charge, it identified what I could do in a power cut and the experiments will continue and I expect I will make a list. It has "power lifting" more so resistive loads up to 1500W can be used, however, I will be on the look out for devices that can run at 600W or less, at the thrift store of course.

A great little discovery, or perhaps another useless gizmo foisted upon us by the machine, as we must all know, that nothing we buy any more has anything to do with "need" but is more generated by an irrational want, driven by the mind churning tsunami of desire of stuff, generated by the endless feeling of need, sourced by the seeds of consumerism.

Either that or cystitis, you know, the feeling of needing to pee all the time.

It never ends.

Today, at a liquidation store in Langford, I bought these :

I thought the garage was a little empty.

They are Dell Optiplex SFF (Small Form Factor) 7040 machines, no hard drives of course, but two have a sixth generation i5-6500 cpu and the other two have very capable i7-6700 processors. Three of them had 16GB of DDR4 and one had none, each has a DVD rewriter and the motherboards are modern enough to have an m.2 slot. After a  little attention, all four of them work and I have no idea what to do with them yet. It is a sign of the times that these four potentially useful computers cost me a paltry $45 for them all, and I will do my best to save them, and others like them, from the landfill.

The scope of waste in the electronics industry is unprecedented, the store that I bought these at had probably fifty other desktops a little bit older than the ones I bought, the four I bought have sixth generation "Skylake" Intel processors and the remaining units at the store have the fourth generation "Haswell" processors from 2014 which are considered obsolete by the industry and the brainwashed buying public. If I could buy them all I would and make them into useful "office" machines, however, I realise that behaviour like that will maybe make me change the blog name from TOTG to TOCTG with the added letter indicating I have gone crazy, which I probably already have.

Anyone want to buy a camel?

Love them, new machines, even when they're not new.

For an old bloke like me, today was an exciting day, because during the week I discovered that the Victoria "Asset Investment Recovery Branch" was again open, Fridays from 9.00am through to 4.00pm, and the cash and carry was once again available to walk in plebs like myself. I did not have this blog way back in time, before covid, when this place was open, but back in the day, I bought stuff on a regular basis, mostly Lenovo branded stuff, released from the bonds of government servitude, monster machines for bread and butter money. Then of course, covid came along and spoiled all of our fun, all of it, almost every little bit of it, except for alcohol of course, covid basically just enhanced alcohol usage and streaming Netflix while it was cheap.

There is, online, lots of hate directed at Microsoft, and perhaps Intel as well, for coming up with all the machines that are considered obsolete when it comes to the massively mediocre Windows 11 operating system, because of TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot and Master Boot Records and well, the new way of doing that particular thing called GPT for newer machines, because we all need bigger storage, because, well, we do and to push back from that is silly, is it not?

This is one of those machines, in fact the last generation of the machines that are not compatible with what Microsoft deems acceptable, shame on them, all of those people, for they know not what they do.

Ok, back to me and the Asset Investment wotsit, we went there today, after having our tires rotated for the fifth time at Westshore Tires, never understood tire rotation, I am sure every time I drive that car the tires are rotated. Anyhoo, after all that bullshit we went to the Government recovery branch star chamber and bought this baby :  

This is my kind of purchase, a poor little laptop that nobody wants, the Asset Recovery people are making sure that they are recovering tax payers dollars from all the kit that has been used a bit by government employess, their technicians pull the solid state hard drive out of them for security purposes (yeah, right) and then they sell the laptops without a boot drive, but that can be bought for a few bucks and Windows 10, which is good for at least a year nowadays, can be installed and validated free, because it is baked into the UEFI of the individual machine and is quite legal.

Nuts and bolts ; this T-470s laptop, in like new condition, has 8GB of DDR4 ram and an i5-7300u CPU, has a backlit keyboard (essential for Mr. Magoo characters like myself) and a great screen, plus adapter and all that, so all I need to do is install an M.2 solid state hard drive and install an operating system, which of course will NOT be Windows 10 or 11, but will be a LInux based distro.

The laptop was $75 plus tax. I have bought a 500GB M.2 SSD for $40 and am now waiting for the nice Amazon truck person to deliver it and when it arrives I will go through the installation of the M.2 drive and then, probably perhaps, the installation of an operating system on the new (to me) baby and wonder what the hell I am going to do with it.

Putting it all together.

Out with the old and in with the new is not quite the right thing to say as it should be "out with the old and in with the not so old", basically my lifelong habit of recycling everything from a previous computer and creating a machine with more capability, plus the support of the latest variant of a familiar operating system.

I wrote this to my buddy this morning :

"It is definitely a security and performance improvement to switch from our current (not supported) motherboards and CPUs to the quite vast array of supported units, changing the ancient master boot record (MBR) to the expanded GUID Partition table (GPT) is required, but relatively straightforward and allows for bigger storage space. The trusted platform module (TPM) built into the supported CPUs and configured with the BIOS of supported motherboards, enhances security, along with a thing they call Secure Boot which again creates a sort of fortress against malware and unsecure programs at the boot stage. All of this is an improvement, in addition to the general hardware improvements the public can enjoy from the new generations of motherboards and processors, USB-C connectivity and the faster USB4 transfer rates, multiple NVME drive support and perhaps even WiFi 7 on the motherboard"

The new motherboard has USB-C and USB 3.2 and supports two NVME drives, but I'm only using one and it also has an M.2 slot for WiFi but I'm using the previous PCIe WiFi card, which coincidently, uses the same type of slot and WiFi card, I like the integrated aspect of the antenna on the old kit and would have to run antenna wires across my motherboard if I used the integrated slot. 

So there we are, the younger motherboard is introduced to all the older bits, and it is time for the post mortem of how much this upgrade cost, which will be shocking. Motherboard was $100 from marketplace, the I/O Shield was $15.40 from eBay and came from the Netherlands (but China actually) and I bought two more 4GB sticks of DDR4 which was another $10 on marketplace. A total of $125.40 for the "new" bits and all the previous kit was reused. Windows 11 Home was installed free with a digital license linked to my Microsoft account, GPT, TPM and Secure boot will keep me safe at night while this backup machine sits in the garage waiting for something to break on my gaming machine.

This upgrade cost is not quite true as it will be offset by selling the replaced motherboard on marketplace, which I estimate will bring in about $50 or thereabouts, although I am optimistic and am swinging for the stars with my initial pricing, we will see I suppose, perhaps the market for sixth and seventh generation kit is over and I will reuse that one and experiment with a gaming machine variant of Linux in the near future. That will be interesting for sure, however, selling the old kit, while I can, is the way forward.

All done! - What's next?