Why 2017 is not a good year to build a PC gamer

Assembling a new PC by parts is an excellent investment for the future, since we make sure we have a balanced system with quality components, much better than those of the typical preassembled PCs that we can buy in many stores. Given this situation, many users decide to dare to mount their first personalized PC, however, 2017 is not exactly a good year for it for various reasons.

Index of contents

Some of the key components of a PC do not stop rising in price

The most PC fans have seen how this year 2017 the prices of some of the key components have risen when assembling a new computer, which is why the same configuration can be much more expensive than a year or two ago.

RAM

RAM is one of the components that has risen the most in price for about a year and it seems that the situation will not change before 2018. This is due to several reasons, on the one hand , smartphone manufacturers use it every time greater amounts of memory so they take a good part of the total of the manufactured chips, this makes their availability for the PC sector decrease and therefore prices rise. To aggravate the situation, Micron, one of the largest manufacturers of RAM memory, has had problems in one of its factories and has been forced to close it. This factory in question produced 6% of the total chips worldwide so it is quite important in the market.

Micron is forced to close a DRAM factory, price rise imminent

A year ago it was possible to buy DDR4 memory kits with a capacity of 8 GB for just over 30 euros, today the same kits can cost 70 euros or even more. So if you are going to mount a PC it is recommended that you buy the necessary RAM and when the prices drop you will have the opportunity to buy more.

Graphics cards

The boom in the cryptocurrency mining such as Ethereum has made the availability of graphics cards, especially those from AMD, has been greatly reduced, even today it is almost impossible to find a Radeon RX 470 or better for sale and if you find it be prepared to pay almost double its official price. In recent months, Nvidia cards have also started to become scarce, although their availability is much higher than AMD's.

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SSD drives

SSD disks are another fundamental component when building a modern PC, something similar happens to RAM since smartphone manufacturers also take a large part of the NAND memory chips that are manufactured, these chips are the ones used to manufacture SSDs. It also influences that some of the manufacturing plants that were dedicated to producing NAND chips are now dedicated to manufacturing RAM memory chips, which makes the availability of the NAND even lower and therefore prices rise.

Samsung 850 EVO - Hard Drive (250GB, Serial ATA III, 540MB / s, 2.5 "), Black 250GB SSD Storage Capacity; Sequential Read Speed ​​of up to 540MB / s and Write Speed ​​of up to 520MB / s 63.26 EUR Crucial BX300 CT240BX300SSD1 - 240 GB SSD Internal Hard Drive (3D NAND, SATA, 2.5 Inch) More than 300% faster than a normal hard drive; Power efficiency more than 45 times higher than that of a Typical Drevo x1Series Hard Drive 60GB SSD 2.5 Inch SATA3 Solid State Drive Read 500MB / s Write 90MB / s Speed: Read speed up to 500MB / s; Impressive Improvement: Up to 10-15 times faster than a standard hard drive

If a year ago you could buy a 240 GB SSD for around 50-60 euros, now prices have risen to approximately 90 euros, or even more than 100 euros in models based on MLC memories of higher quality than TLC.

Motherboards

Another component that has risen in price are motherboards. Manufacturers are betting on using designs with increasingly spectacular aesthetics, with many RGB LED lights and that is something that costs money and makes the final price of the product higher.

If before it was possible to buy a fairly advanced board for about 90-100 euros, now we have to go to 130-150 euros if we do not want to run out of some advanced features such as 7.1 sound systems and the ability to overclock the processor.

The "gamer" fashion

Finally, I am going to talk about the term "gamer" widely used today in many components and peripherals, it is something that does not really contribute anything (someone explain to me that it has a special motherboard gamer) in terms of features but manufacturers take advantage of the tagline to raise the price a few euros. The gamer is in fashion and all manufacturers want to make the most of the situation.