I’ve been trying to upgrade my desktop since the motherboard is dying and I’ve found that small factor pc (SFFPC) components are rarer and at even more of a premium than usual. Most commenters in various forums chalk it up to the plague, so now I’m hoping once the next generation of CPU, motherboard, and GPUs come out things won’t be as scarce.

Interesting you mention this, because I noticed a surprising surge out of nowhere among my friends, who suddenly all decided to build a SFPC. Despite none of them ever being interested in SFPC and all of them running mid/full-towers prior.

None of them are first-time PC builders tho, so it might have something to do with lockdown-induced boredom, and my friends deciding to challenge themselves to build a SFPC. As it sounds like a major pain and challenge compared to even a mid-tower (according to those of them who have already finished).

I won't be building a new computer for a few more years, as I currently can't justify the cost of replacing my build, but when I do it'll almost certainly be a SFF build.

I've seen a number of people who have built tiny custom cases, and the challenge of both building something like that and getting everything to fit in it is super enticing. Definitely seems like the challenge and cool factor of fitting tons of power into something tiny is making a lot of people consider such builds over traditional mid or full tower machines.

For me it was because I’m moving soon and wanted to have a smaller computer to move. The shortages put a stop to that though.

> I’m hoping once the next generation of CPU, motherboard, and GPUs come out things won’t be as scarce

New desktop Intel 10th Gen CPU are actually coming out pretty soon. It's got a new socket (LGA 1200), so new motherboards are coming out for it as well.

It's only marginally faster on single thread benchmarks than the Ryzen 3000s (ie Zen 2) chips, and consumes a lot energy.

Also, Intel is still using their circa-2104/ancient 14 nm process for these desktop 10th Gen chips, which is quite disappointing. No Ice Lake 10 nm desktop chips yet.

I was most likely going to stick with and AMD CPU, the intel power consumption and price per performance is a bit high for me. I’m mostly developing javascript and gaming so ultra high cpu performance isn’t as necessary.

> javascript and gaming

Both of which are heavily impacted by single-thread performance. So getting a high single-thread perf CPIU would be a good thing to do.

The whole crypto thing is such a fascinating experiment of human behavior and side effects and so on.

Glad I bought mine before that craze. Has that opened a cheap used GPU market or did they burn them out?

Yep, rx 570/580s are selling for great used prices on eBay. I pretty much recommend them to anyone going a budget build.

I'd definitely recommend against buying second hand GPU from crypto miners. They have been worn out running 24/7 for years.

If it's selling for $30 I don't say, but I've seen them going for a fair bit of the original price.

The thing is I've never worn out a piece of equipment in 25 years of computer enthusiasm. I've had some DOAs and infamous equipment (say Deathstar) but never failures even second hand equipment. Is that different for 24/7 max power draw or is it just YMMV (and usually will still work)?

I've seen every single piece of equipment worn out over the past decades except the CPU.

Hard disk and GPU are the worst in my experience. They have the shortest lifespan and they're the most impactful when they die. Hard disk die suddenly destroying all data, self explanatory. GPU die slowly, progressively having rendering error then crashing the system erratically.

I've taken 3 GPU to their grave between my personal computers and my family's.

To limit my spending I have a personal policy where I don't upgrade my GPU until it dies (I don't generally play the latest AAA games on my PC) and with just one outlier since 2004 I've had a new one about every 4-5 years. I've actually never had a CPU fail but I've had several HDDs die.

Nah if your HDD is dying it’s either your task really demands it OR you’re not cooling them enough.

If your GPU is dying it’s VRAM or VRM is failing under high heat. Manufacturers cut fan speed to cut fan noise until warranty claims increase substantially so they never provide sufficient cooling at stock settings.

Rackmount servers don’t sound like jet engines for no reason. Things fail if you don’t do that.

I've had hard disks fail in a PVR setup (heavy load), I've had memory fail, I've had motherboards fail, I've had power supplies fail, and I've literally typed laptop keyboards to death in ~2 years. I'd be utterly unsurprised about a GPU failure.

The best case scenario is "selling it because I'm buying a new one", the worst case scenario is "selling it because it's starting to flake out", and "selling it because the warranty ran out" is not much better.

Storage fails all the time. Cables, power supplies, UPS, monitors, keyboards, mice - I have a graveyard in a cabinet.

Also motherboards who's capacitors dry up; connectors that develop faults.

This is of course leaving out devices who's firmware get exploited and become poison (routers, USB devices with malware)

It's both.

The ymmv is always big with electronics. I.e. my second last graphics card (gtx970) died within 2 yrs. But the aging effect from running 24/7 under high load is very real as well.

The high temperatures of permanently running on full power just wears it down

Besides mechanical parts you can still see failure from weary chemical components (capacitors, easily fixed), solder joints (fix depends on the joint. BGA chips aren't easy to fix) failing due to cycles of thermal expension and retraction or water damage, and lastly electromigration (the real unfixable damage, it usually happens from overvoltage/overheat).

At worse you might need to spend 20 bucks to replace tired fans.

Mining GPUs run undervolted without powercycling. They're fine.

Eh, I mined on some GPUs for ~a year. They're all still running today in various family members' PCs. Admittedly I was mining Ethereum where the main goal was to undervolt and underclock as much as possible while maximizing the memory clock.

How did you cool them? I mean, didn’t you find stock fans way too weak especially had it been in a “quiet” PC?

All the cards I had were "aftermarket" cards with better coolers (7x dual fan GTX 1070s & Pentium G3258 running Gentoo). It wasn't silent but it really wasn't that noisy. After unvolting and underclocking the GPU core, and overclocking the memory, they ran at ~60C under constant load.

I gave three of them to family members and sold the other 4. I was absolutely upfront in my eBay listings of their history.

I picked up a refurbished Vega 56 last year for a great deal. I suspect it was a mining card. Seems to work fine.

They are fine but you will need to replace thermal compound and reflash bios. The miners usually under clock the GPU and overclock the memory.