$800 used to be enough?

[ddrueding]

A friend has asked me to help them with a PC. No games, light DAW use, light office use, 3 monitors.

My first instinct was the cheapest current-generation AMD CPU, basic motherboard from a known brand, 32GB of RAM, 2TB M.2, efficient power supply of a known brand, and any AMD/nVidia GPU. Suddenly I'm looking at a $1500 machine.

Can anyone who's done this more recently shed some light on what I'm seeing? Do I need to go prebuilt at this price point?

 

[sedrosken]

You're pretty much bang-on. DRAM and to a lesser extent NAND prices are in crisis right now and only getting worse and GPUs have been insanity for years, even at the low-mid end. I will say, if it's a light-use machine, just stick with the integrated graphics. An APU is 100% fine for 99.97% of people these days, especially with the savings from the GPU diverted to RAM. Most "normal" motherboards will have multiple display outputs.

 

[Mercutio]

RAM prices are up 400% (literally, the RAM kit in my workstation was $350 when I bought it and now it's over $1700). NVMe for anything but the DRAM-less budget segment is similarly high. I mentioned this a few weeks ago, but I was able to buy three 4TB drives back in August for what one costs right now. Graphics cards have also skyrocketed in cost. AGAIN.

As for how to correct this, first consider 16GB RAM. Also consider a 1TB SSD and a mechanical drive drive for bulk data.

Or you could jump on the mini-PC train and pick up an HX370 like this beast.

 

[Mercutio]

You can make something like a Ryzen 5600G/16GB/2TB or a Ryzen 9600X (or 7700X, maybe)/16GB/1TB work for around $800, if you can accept the iGPU in either product.

In my mind either one of those builds should be more like $550 or $600, but cheap RAM just can't be had. I don't mind putting a second-hand GPU into a build like that to keep it below $1000, but the sub-$200 options at that point are kind of comical. Maybe you can find a GTX1070?