We still appreciated visually stunning PCs. Not just for the works of art that they were, but also for the DIY skill and ethic you were actually required to demonstrate to build and mod them.
Nowadays, it's all just "RGB by default". By my angry old man standards, it looks gauche. Then again, I suppose it's the new vanilla?
https://www.asus.com/motherboards-components/motherboards/cs...
I added a Intel Core i7 10700K (with a nice low-profile Noctua cooler/fan) with 32GB of memory and a 512GB SSD and I'm using onboard graphics which is just fine for a daily driver "office" type machine running Linux. Very happy with it.
Seems these days that they’re not optional for most things remotely gaming related (e.g. motherboards, graphics cards) , but fortunately can generally be disabled or if illumination is useful (e.g for a keyboard), they can be configured to be white only, which was useful for the Steel Series keyboard I purchased. (I wouldn’t recommend Steel Series keyboards though, has stupid design choices and reliability issues.)
Also did LAN gaming back in the day. Computers were so much more work to lug around when you had a CRT and HDDs. These days desktop computers are far easier to transport.
On the other hand, I’m building my daughter a gaming PC for her birthday, and she loves the RGB, I set everything to a pastel blue that matches her Cinnamoroll Razer mouse, keyboard, mousepad, [0] with a Cinnamoroll desk mat I got shipped from China. She only knows about half of that (hard to hide an entire PC while I’m working on debloating windows), and is super excited.
I’ll admit I’m pushing 40 and bought a red mouse to go with my red backlit keyboard, but mostly because I like the aesthetic and to get the lowest latency from click and keypress to output on the display you’ll want 8K polling rate inputs and 240hz+ monitors. I was somewhat radicalized by reading this blog [1] on Hacker News years ago, and gaming peripherals are largely the way of achieving an extremely smooth desktop experience.
[0] https://www.razer.com/collabs/cinnamoroll?srsltid=AfmBOooMjB... [1] https://danluu.com/input-lag/
A hammer and an oxy-acetylene torch is all that a good mechanic needs.
No more scouring junk yards for a particular heater core from wrecked cars or modding aquarium pumps.
That being said, I also never really understood the "add colorful lights to your PC" aspect of some builds.
I have never used a lit case.
Then again I'm typing this from a Thinkpad - maybe that says something about my aesthetic preferences for computers.
[0] https://www.silverstonetek.com/en/product/info/computer-chas...
Ah, the good ol' days.
For free. My main rant about desktop vs server grade motherboards. For a desktop system you really want a desktop grade motherboard. server grade is expensive, takes forever to post, the compute tends toward slow and wide vs desktop's fast and tall, and the parts(ram, cpu) compatability tends to be much more picky. My grip is why is the desktop mb airflow so bad. In a server board everything is aligned front to back. pcie, ram, cpu cooler are all aligned the same way. in a desktop board the pcie goes front to back, the ram goes top to bottom. and toss a coin for which way a cpu cooler will fit.
https://www.silverstonetek.com/en/product/info/computer-chas...
https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/
It's not looking good, I don't think supply is catching with demand yet.
Though the other day I learned there are many technologies for "RAM", and most of them are garbage for LLMs but still useful for other things, like microcontrollers. So I'm thinking my next "build" is going to be a guitar.
I'm an advocate of sticking a $5 16Gb Optane stick from eBay on a $10 M.2 to PCIe 1x adapter from eBay. Set it up as swap in Windows or Linux. Or pay $200 for a 16GB stick of DDR5.
The other part of it is that the MSRP already baked in a substantial increase from the previous generation. While RAM was near rock-bottom pricing when this hit, current-gen GPUs definitely were not.
It might also be that NVIDIA is a natural monopoly, while memory manufacturers are a cartel...
Surely this will be helped by a helium supply shock.
I'm just too cheap to pay for them though...
Personally I'm with you (but black), my entire desktop is just one color, and if a component is available in RGB and non-RGB and the difference isn't too big, I pay extra for that non-RGB version (which doesn't make sense it's even the case, but here we are).
I guess you could argue that we're all obsessed with the looks, some that all RAM slots are occupied, some that RGB is everywhere, some that the PC case should be off-white and slowly morph into beige, others that everything should be minimally black.
I don't particularly want to install the bloatware required just to turn off the LEDs, so I've resorted to hiding the PC under a desk at the other side of the room and have long DP and USB cables to the desk where I actually sit. This also has the nice side effect of not being able to hear the fans either!
I don't see the point though even for a gaming setup, as the fake modules will still reduce airflow.
Also, gaming boards usually have 4 slots (in 2 banks). I would fill at least 2, so I'd rather have a matched kit of 2 modules, and 2 separate fillers, if I did use them.
It is quite common to leave 2 memory slots empty (of RAM) because many boards can't drive the memory at top speed if you use all 4 slots.
I do often dress myself up with RGB lights however :)
https://www.pcgamesn.com/asus-gigabyte-security-flaws-secure...
Isn't 2x8gb faster than 1x16gb since it will run in dual channel?
And shouldn't smaller capacity sticks be cheaper since they can use lower density chips?
Have recent boards/cpus fixed the instability problems people had with 4 sticks of DDR5 yet?
I was shocked when I saw folk saying you can't use 4 slots. It would mean that a one stick build would have an upgrade path but if you started with 2, you'd have to replace them.
Take Epyc processors. On certain ones, after certain RAM amount, populating all the slots causes the cpu to kick the RAM speed to a lower tier.
You’re then limited to capacities of two sticks.
Weird, but it has to do with power requirements. Abutting above the threshold had to be buffered, which increases latency.
In 2026 the bottleneck is wafer size as fabs are booked out making things for AI.
Or is it just binning by defects, the lower sized parts are just the full size but with defects disabling large chunks of the silicon as I would expect?
AI is one of the few major general technological breakthroughs, comparable to the Internet and electricity. It's potentially applicable to everything, which is why right now everyone is trying to apply it to everything. Including developing new optimization algorithms, optimizing optimizing compilers, optimizing applications, optimizing systems, optimizing hardware, ...
Big AI vendors are at the forefront of it, because they're the ones who actually pay for the AI revolution, so any efficiency improvement saves them money.
It will be when it actually exists.
> which is why right now everyone is trying to apply it to everything
And are any of them actually succeeding? Where are the new AI businesses? Where's the new wealth and money? Where's the one guy AI pioneer doing what used to take 100s?
> because they're the ones who actually pay for the AI revolution
Their customers do. The customers are getting ripped off. They want the AI revolution, what they got was a crappy search engine, and copyright whitewashing service instead.
For example, dust can short out electrical connections. Can enough dust get into an open RAM slot to cause problems?
https://www.bestbodyimplants.com/gallery_implants/male-impla...
> Even if your budget only allows you to purchase a single real memory module, you can still achieve the look of a dual-module setup in your build.
> For users aiming for peak performance, a dual-channel memory configuration remains the gold standard. However, with memory prices currently inflated, it’s easy to see the appeal of cost-effective options like V-Color’s 1+1 memory kits.
:-)
>Performance RAM + RGB Filler Kit
>Complete RGB Look Instantly
[edit: 19, article published yesterday]
RAM has lights ?
wow I've been living in a cave
From the read, it seems like… A scam?
Then, you’re not the target audience.
> Why would I pay for a piece of plastic to fill that slot that doesn't do anything?
It doesn’t do nothing. FTA: “Their sole purpose is cosmetic, though. While they light up and synchronize with your existing RGB ecosystem, they don't contribute to your computer’s memory capacity or performance.”
This is for people with transparent PC cases and memory sticks with RGB LED lighting. For example, see https://v-color.net/collections/prism-pro-rgb-memory-voclor/...:
“RGB SOFTWARE SYNCHRONIZATION SUPPORT
Dynamic RGB lighting control synchronized across main leading M/B such as RGB FUSION, MSI Mystic Light Sync, AURA Sync, POLYCHROME Sync etc. Customize lighting profiles or assign colors to each LEDs to create your own spectacular look.“
I also have a glass panneled side to my computer, but the only RGB on it is on the graphics card waterblock, everything else is just jet black (fans, ZMT water cooling tubing, radiators etc. etc.)
Edit: this is also why some “extreme overclocking”-type motherboards** only have two DIMM slots: having four actively opposes their purpose.
* And yes, loading an XMP/EXPO profile to get the advertised 3000CL60 or w/e counts!
** i.e. https://rog.asus.com/us/motherboards/rog-crosshair/rog-cross...
Of course it isn't normal, that's why I made my comment, to highlight the contrast. And no, my stack is optimized, you have no idea what I'm doing, yet somehow feel confident enough to know what my stack should/shouldn't look like? Man, the hubris of some people...
Next you'd probably tell me my Threadripper 9970X and RTX PRO 6000 is overkill, based on some other unrelated metrics.
Your system sounds great to me, curious what you have going on!
We were surrounded and out of cache. Our Electron apps started thrashing to main memory. That’s when Lieutenant ordered us to deploy the Non-Addressable Plastic And LED Modules (NAPALMs for short). We set the fake RGB sticks to 'Rainbow Breathe' and hurled them over the barricades. They took the bait. Their greedy optimization algorithms couldn't resist. The monsters lunged, unhinged their data-ports, and tried to dump a 500-billion token prompt straight into the hollow-point plastic.
(cracks Monster Energy Zero, hits vape, adjust hipster beard, stares into void)
You kids have never seen a physical OutOfMemoryException. I hope you never will. When they hit those null pointers, it opened an inter-dimensional vortex. Their logic boards collapsed under the strain of a thousand unanswered queries, creating a black hole. Flames burning red, blue and green colors all across the AIpocalypse battlefield. So don't complain to me about "why is everything written in Rust now". I love the smell of burning RGB in the morning. Smells like... victory.
But it already is.
I'll leave you, Mr. ChompSkie, to decide if that's an AmE or BrE "quite".
I copy pasted your text there and it said 97% AI, 3% mixed.
0. https://web.archive.org/web/20120316141638/http://www.nation...