nice video, LTT always has nice shorts for the uninitated..... and pricing .... If i would count my current gpu and MB at their general sales price during launch it would have set me back almost 2900 euro's....... with a little patience and some luck it now 'only' costed me around 1700.

Decent game systems just seem to need a random amount of components purchased for a price ranging between 2 and 3000 euro's

About a half year ago my 990 PRO 2 TB was close to 300 CHF, now the price is about half of that and some worse performing SSDs may even be less than 100 CHF.

However, if we go up in space, lets say 4 TB, the price is still more than double but a half year ago it was even worse with prices up to 600 CHF for 4 TB (nearly 3 times the price). I had a lucky deal with 430 CHF but this was a special offer...

In total, the SSDs i used was around 800 CHF, total 8 TB of size (so i had a price of around 100 CHF/TB, more than 6 months ago)... so, nope, if you want to have the entire archive installed... making a bibilothek... then it is still very expensive. Because you can not use the cheap 2 TB SSDs this way... you will need 4 TB or even bigger modules.

It is safe to say, for any "casual gamer" who only instal a small bunch of new games, up to 20, it is NOW pretty cheap but matters will change as soon as you want to "step up" your game, making a huge bibliothek.

However, there is still the issue with very high GPU prices... and even the motherboard prices are pretty high. You can still get cheap boards but they never had so few features... for example the cheapest AM5 boards with a debug-LED is around 400 CHF. Some generations ago... it was about half the price for a board with a debug-LED.

Inflation itself got no meaning, what truly matters is your "purchasing power", as, the inflation will have to be mitigated by your income. Yet this income is not able to catch up with inflation... this is the problematic spot for most of us.

So in general, buying a capable system clearly got even more expensive than for example 20 years ago.

Nah... some parts may drop a lot in price over time... other parts almost no drop.

For example those parts had close to no price drop:

X670E MSI Ace motherboard... still priced nearly 700 CHF.

7800X3D CPU, still about launch price, and most likely it will barely drop in price for a pretty long period... and you want to use your PC TODAY... not in a half year...

3090 TI GPU or comparable: It was around 1300 but even 3/4 year later a comparable GPU with equal quality is still around 1000 CHF. I never got it for the launch-robbery-price of course... so i had to wait like crazy for the price to go down... which took more than a half year since launch.

Seasonic Titanium PSU is still around 350 CHF. It was close to 400 over a half year ago... yet the only reason this PSU dropped in price is because there is a new revision with a native ATX 3.0.

CPU coolers in general their prices are barely ever dropping...

Parts that really dropped:

DDR5 RAM... about 1/3 of launch price. RAM was always priced very mad at launch... nothing new, but you do not want to wait forever when a new platform with new RAM will launch.

Small to medium sized SSDs (less than 4 TB), the huge ones are still rather high priced.

Actually only those 2 parts really dropped a lot, but it is still a lot you can save up, especially when using a lot of SSDs for your board (3-4 modules).

But sure... you can always buy the cheapest trash possible... even today it still is possible to save up tons of bucks but most likely it is not the stuff you truly enjoy and there is always some weak spots (show me your hardware, i am gonna tell you your trade off).

Yet, indeed... sufficient RAM and a sufficient SSD is surely more affordable than ever ago.

I also stand by my first contention that a good (not top of the line) gaming PC in 1996 cost upwards of £1,200 to £1,500. Assuming 2.2% per annum inflation and the lower estimate of £2,084 for parts, you can get:

RTX 4070 - £600 - Ebuyer
Ryzen 5800X3D - £271.52 - Amazon
Some form of CPU cooler - say £120 tops
16GB RAM - £50 - ebuyer
2TB WD SN 770 Nvme - £90 - ebuyer
Samsung 870 QVO 4TB - £180 - Amazon
Asus Prime B550M motherboard - £80 - box
850W BeQuiet PSU - £87 CCL computers

That all adds up to £1,478.50 - leaving £605.50 for a case, keyboard, mouse, monitor and OS (assuming you don't already have them) It's not the best gaming PC out there, but it's as good (in relative terms) as what you could get for £1200-1500 in 1996.

Of course, the big skew over the last few years is on the graphics cards - if they were still £250ish, computer prices would be even cheaper than they already are relative to historical costs.

Interestingly, the forum didn't like my posts about inflation, but the short version is that

In 1997, the median weekly salary in the UK was £317
In 2021, the median weekly salary for all full time males in the UK was £651

That's an increase of 105.3% (it's on a median salary - so not affected by the super-rich)

Bank of England statistics give inflation as 74% over the same period.

This means that generally, across the economy, wealth increases faster than inflation - which makes sense as otherwise you wouldn't have any economic growth.

Median is useless.... because the gape between rich and poor was increasing with every new year... thus, the poorer 50% will have way lesser, the 30% above the median about same... and only the 20% most wealthy ones got more than ever before. We was not able to fight this inequal behaviour, yet we even was able to make it worse...

So, you was removing the 20% of the top? Because compared to the 50% poorer ones, those 20% can be considered already "super rich"... and the upper 2% are not super rich, they are beyond what you can even count.

Sure, the median will kinda almost ignore the upper 2%, working as intended; but the median is still unable to remove the upper 20%, the weight is simply to high. The thing simply is, about every 2. human barely manages to get any wealth at all... those are actually the ones to take a closer look at, not the ones "above", they do not matter a lot as they are "out of troubles." Would be even better just to remove the upper 50%, then we will have the most accurate results if it comes to "purchasing power". I think, a nations wealth can be seen on "how you treat a animal and how you treat the weakest humans".

Oh... i hope you are not a woman then... and hopefully not a part time worker...
Of course not... else you would probably give me another "example".

In my mind, you may have some valid points but you are somewhat simple minded and some critical edges of the calculations are not considered at all.

Besides, this Asus board... even one of the cheapest on the entire lineup... i hope i do not need to own it. Asus as a brand was decreasing in quality year after year... and the cheapest from THIS brand... oh my... making me scared.

I bet, maybe 20+ years ago the PC was not cheaper (taking the purchasing power of the unfair median into account) but the quality, at this price, was certainly better. I am not personally gonna calculate it because to me the matter is "beyond simple maths", i got a nose, a brain and a heart... and i see what is going on with all my senses.

And if i hadn't pushed myself to get a NAS i would still be limited to fitting stuff within the storage restraints i had before, namely 2TB with mostly full drives and burning discs to make room. On top of that going with the cheapest possible internet price (likely $50 or more) because i don't see the point in anything higher. Just because you can spend about $100 to get a 2TB drive doesn't mean I'd go out and buy a new 2TB every month. And 8Mbit connection ONLY means it would take 88 straight hours to get 250Gb downloaded, and in that 88 hours if as a normal person you were only on the computer 8 hours a day, that's about 11 days.

Nothing says wanting to play the latest game right away like waiting nearly 2 weeks. Or maybe they'll go back to discs now that there's more problems with game preservation cropping up with Nintendo and other companies shown they can just pull their games any time.

Why bother getting a 250Gb game when Skyrim is 10Gb? I can get that much faster, in under a day in fact and likely play more than 100 hours.

5k/s at top speed with dialup. Yep, 1 meg every 4-10 minutes, that's what you'd estimate.

I remember having something closer to 4Gb among two drives, and i had to choose between Morrowind or Diablo 2. Didn't have room for anything else, and stayed that way for quite a while. Sucks to be poor. Didn't change much until after i was in the army.

Well if you have no life whatsoever and can dump your money into your gaming, then sure. Back in 1996 i think i was making, oh, $200 a month working at a theater. Not sure about you, but buying a $600 video card vs getting food for my birds.

Now i miss my birds. :(

1996, think i had a 100Mhz 486 DX with 8MB ram, and probably a 600Mb drive. Not exactly primed for heavy games as a teen.

I still say games are getting too big, and 8Gb is about as big as I'd prefer them, 20GB for something really big; I'll start adding game sizes to my review score. I foresee a lot of 1's if that's the case. Hell i gave tons of downvotes for games on steam because they required the steam client to boot, so it's all the same to me.

A bit better than me. 486 DX2 @ 66 MHz, 540 Mb HDD, 512 Kb Trident video card, I think still 4 Mb RAM at the time, though it might have been upgraded to 8 Mb already, might have happened at some point in '96.

In 2000 I had a 3.2 GB HDD, added a 20 GB one in 2001.

I'll assume you calling me simple minded is because English isn't your first language, but please be aware that it is a very insulting thing to say to someone.

I struggle to understand the rest of your post, but clearly we aren't going to be able to have a further discussion without straying into politics, especially as you have brought up inequality. I've tried to make my example straightforward so that people without an economics degree can understand it.

That being said, there are a few things I will add:

1) I would suggest that you review the definition of median again (it's the middle person in a range, so isn't impacted by the richest or the poorest - it's less skewed than the mean).
2) Whether or not you like the Asus board is irrelevant - there are other B550s that are available that work very well with the components that I've suggested and it's a reasonable quality build that will play anything released this year at 1440p maxed out
3) Mean full time male was chosen because the statistics were easily available. Generally, I would expect the mean salary for full or part time women to have increased more over the same period (due to increased participation in the workforce in significantly more senior roles) Part-time male salaries may not have increased by the same amount, but I'm not going to bother to look up the statistics, because it's not a debate that I'm interested in having.

Don't think i had more than 15Gb for quite a while, actually with no internet from 2000-2005 and no money for games (other than a handful of second hand console games)... Actually even with my ABS barebones system i don't think i had that much drive space. It's only after 2010 that i started getting 500Gb externals. and 1Tb externals in 2015.

but the parts that do drop are not specifically tied to one specific part of pc building. If you now are suggesting that it is not possible to build a pc that is made of entirely out of discounted parts, then i am very shocked, good sir.

As for the parts that wished for, i managed to do quite all right. Monitor on black friday, m.2' s on the go.. aimed for a founder edition, that managed to get bumped because of a wrong sentence for the location of delivery. Cancelled the order and then i got hit by this other card, AIO which had launch price of 2300 euro going for 14 something....now that was a steal though a bit more in price than the FE. 64 GB of high speed ddr 4 memory which i also had at about 50% of the launch price. Damn thing wrecked my poor B460 board and found myself returning with this Z590 board for also about a 50% cut.

On the cpu part i might agree..... about the price

I'm okay with that... as long as you make it clear in the score that the game size has impacted it!

It is useless, because there is a limit on how poor you can be but there is almost no limit on how rich you can be.

The middle is looking like this:

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 77, 777, 7777, 77777: The median will be picking the 6!!

So, completely useless maths.

However, if we remove those ugly numbers starting with several digits... we have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and the median is 4! Which is a 33% cut in salary... and this is the salary 50% actually got in this case as a median. So the richest are still dragging it up, but the reality is probably worse because i got no clue on what base the median is calculated exactly, so there is lot of room for "manipulation toward certain wishes". Just no meaning,,,

Same with Inflation, because it totally depends WHAT you buy and the calculated value is some sort of median with unknown positions. Ultimately i just want to say, this maths is useless to me.

Look, I'm not going to argue with you because you'll believe what you want to anyway, but you could try it again with 30 million data points (being the number of economically active people in the UK) and you might actually see that it's not completely useless.

Anyway, I'm done with this discussion as it's pointless. Have a good weekend.

And even if the median is super precise... i would not wish to be below this median if there is so huge differences between the positions.

Looks a bit to abstract to me, so what PC you finally got and how pricy was the parts?