Does it have to be DIY? Because a quick search says that if 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD is enough then you can get a Zen 2 machine for $300 and a Zen 3 machine for $370.
But man, $400 in 2026 money is a really tight threshold for "affordable". It means PCs were almost never affordable. If I go back to 2017 when that was equivalent to $300, I don't think I can put together a viable build with even 8TB of RAM and 250GB of SSD. I think that standard is too demanding.
> The first permanent jump in GPU prices. After Bitcoin prices of high-end GPUs remained at +1000 USD.
Oh, that was generally other cryptocurrencies but okay I understand.
nVidia has been overcharging, and they've basically increased the prices by one tier. A 70 card costs as much as an 80 used to.
But price per performance continues to improve. A 5050 beats a 1080 for half the price, before even factoring in inflation.
> For bigger profits. You can see most hardware manufacturers moving from selling to consumers to selling to governments, cloud, and data-centers.
> You can maximize profit by leaving a market. In the same way, you can still sell SSDs but for much bigger margins to data centers and governments.
That works when there's enough demand to buy all the chips. AI will stabilize one way or another, and then the remaining datacenter market doesn't need that many chips compared to the consumer market. Manufacturers will have extra supply, and not selling it to consumers would be stupid.
And even if they charged datacenter-level prices to consumers, people would still be able to get PCs. Even if the cheapest new CPU was $500, that's still nowhere near the options being "no PC" and "$40k workstation".
Plus people could buy old datacenter chips for pennies on the dollar.
> Once you are in the walled-in-cloud-garden, computer is not your own, and you can be monitored perfectly. This is something most governments want and is essentially the endgame for war on general computing.
Governments might want it, but that doesn't transfer to chip makers.
