I had an entry level GPU (Radeon RX580 4GB) which I bought from a friend for €150 circa 2018, when its price was about twice more (won’t recall, from €200 to €250 maybe), he just did not need it and the card was overkill for my ‘just render the interface and occasional Photoshop-like kind of task’ workload. I thought I needed it, but it turned out I never utilised it. I don’t play games, that was for my Hackintosh to get a native support (which worked). I needed to upgrade the PSU alongside the GPU. I saw almost no difference in day to day life, since most of my work was some office-like stuff.

We entered some crazy times with GPUs a bit later, 2019 or ’20, another friend who was buying and selling these cards, told me I should sell it for €150 to €180 (basically returning my money back), and while I agreed with him at the time, I did not sell it. I didn’t want to spend my efforts on that, and then spend my efforts on buying something else (I thought I’d still need some GPU).

I regret that slightly. Not much, since €150 isn’t much to lose, and I did not have much resources to spend on this task. But if it was today, I think I’d do that.

I believe RAM prices would fall significantly at some point (would take years), I did buy +16 GB of DDR3 RAM right before the Rampocalypse, but I don’t see DDR3 being too expensive today. I don’t really utilise 32 GB vs 16 GB, but there’s not much point to sell it for what I’ve bought (€30 or so).

DDR5, on the other hand, may sell for a very good price, so if you don’t utilise it fully, why not then? You may buy a much better memory in some years. Keep in mind though that this crisis may take longer than we all hope. May take it not a year or two, but, say, five or ten.

Me, I’m ready for this. I run Linux, which works ideally with even just 8 GB of DDR3 RAM (my current laptop), so I’m pretty confident I’d survive till the prices drop. I’m not even sure I need it being newer and faster. Only if the hardware upgrade price would be insignificant to notice. I’ve got my current laptop from work for free, so that’s even better than I expected. But that’s just a different story.