I think anything rare, high-end, or unusual will be what's desirable/valuable in the future.

Generally, I don't think today's hardware- or anything past maybe 2005- will be as big of a deal as older hardware at all. It'll be outdated, but it won't be retro, and the appeal will be even more fringe than stuff from the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s.

There are a few reasons I can think of why today's hardware will simply be less of a big deal. We hit the point where even cheap PCs were not just good enough but quite good for everyday tasks years ago, and for more intensive tasks like gaming we're hitting increasingly diminishing returns. The rate of advance has slowed dramatically; Skylake was all of 40% faster than Sandy Bridge five years later. And finally, there's a lot more abstraction between the hardware and the software, so there's no need for older hardware to run older programs (the inverse is also largely true). In fact, I found that my main machine running Windows 10 ran some XP-era games better than my XP rig.

That, and today's hardware is kind of boring. Very pretty, but at the end of the day there isn't a ton of variety. Practical, but boring.

My Sandy Bridge rig was my mainstay for five years, and is still in service as a server. Barring hardware failure- and keep in mind that 2010s hardware is more reliable than it was in the past- it will probably continue in that role into the 2020s. I'm planning on replacing my laptop as it just doesn't have enough grunt for me, but with a fresh battery it'll probably serve someone else well for years. My dad's Haswell machine will serve him well into the foreseeable future.

Coming back to my original point, I doubt there will be a ton of interest in standard-issue, boring machines from the late 2000s to the present. There's nothing special about a Core 2 Duo. It's a cheap option that will run modern software surprisingly well, but I struggle to think of anything that a brand new i7 won't do better. There are a few legacy roles, but all the ones I can think of either have to do with older retrocomputing (circular reasoning) or legacy industrial systems (which is actually a major problem in IT and always has been). Moreover, I don't see a system built five years from now being that much different compatibility-wise than that i7.

The only reason to build a machine from this era in the future would be for the cool factor of it. It's not going to be the dime-a-dozen Optiplexes that we're going to want to return to, nor the $100 bang-for-the-buck AM3 motherboard. It's going to be weird stuff like the 775DUAL-VSTA (I threw mine out 🙁 ), expensive stuff like the GTX Titan, and rare stuff like Thunderbolt controllers. I mean, this is true for any era, but I think it's going to be especially true going forward.

Of course, that's just my humble opinion, and I don't have the best record of predicting trends. I dismissed both VR and cryptocurrency, and look where those ended up.

XCVG wrote:

I think anything rare, high-end, or unusual will be what's desirable/valuable in the future. […]
Show full quote

I think anything rare, high-end, or unusual will be what's desirable/valuable in the future.

Generally, I don't think today's hardware- or anything past maybe 2005- will be as big of a deal as older hardware at all. It'll be outdated, but it won't be retro, and the appeal will be even more fringe than stuff from the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s.

There are a few reasons I can think of why today's hardware will simply be less of a big deal. We hit the point where even cheap PCs were not just good enough but quite good for everyday tasks years ago, and for more intensive tasks like gaming we're hitting increasingly diminishing returns. The rate of advance has slowed dramatically; Skylake was all of 40% faster than Sandy Bridge five years later. And finally, there's a lot more abstraction between the hardware and the software, so there's no need for older hardware to run older programs (the inverse is also largely true). In fact, I found that my main machine running Windows 10 ran some XP-era games better than my XP rig.

That, and today's hardware is kind of boring. Very pretty, but at the end of the day there isn't a ton of variety. Practical, but boring.

My Sandy Bridge rig was my mainstay for five years, and is still in service as a server. Barring hardware failure- and keep in mind that 2010s hardware is more reliable than it was in the past- it will probably continue in that role into the 2020s. I'm planning on replacing my laptop as it just doesn't have enough grunt for me, but with a fresh battery it'll probably serve someone else well for years. My dad's Haswell machine will serve him well into the foreseeable future.

Coming back to my original point, I doubt there will be a ton of interest in standard-issue, boring machines from the late 2000s to the present. There's nothing special about a Core 2 Duo. It's a cheap option that will run modern software surprisingly well, but I struggle to think of anything that a brand new i7 won't do better. There are a few legacy roles, but all the ones I can think of either have to do with older retrocomputing (circular reasoning) or legacy industrial systems (which is actually a major problem in IT and always has been). Moreover, I don't see a system built five years from now being that much different compatibility-wise than that i7.

The only reason to build a machine from this era in the future would be for the cool factor of it. It's not going to be the dime-a-dozen Optiplexes that we're going to want to return to, nor the $100 bang-for-the-buck AM3 motherboard. It's going to be weird stuff like the 775DUAL-VSTA (I threw mine out 🙁 ), expensive stuff like the GTX Titan, and rare stuff like Thunderbolt controllers. I mean, this is true for any era, but I think it's going to be especially true going forward.

Of course, that's just my humble opinion, and I don't have the best record of predicting trends. I dismissed both VR and cryptocurrency, and look where those ended up.

Some of it will also be just now we can afford to own it. My 939 rig is a great example of something I wanted to own back in mid 2006, a year outside of highschool but fast food didn't pay that well after paying bills, but now I can afford to own it because a pair of 7900GTX cards cost under 30 dollars now, not 1000, my Opteron 185 comming in from ebay was only 70 dollars not the insane asking price of over 1000 back in 2005, same with my SLI board, i paid 35 dollars for it, new it sold for close to 150. That will play a part in it as well I'm sure.

You will likely get a high school kid who right now uses a family computer or similar with a Core i3/i5 with a GT640 or similar that currently dreams about a 1080Ti and a core i9 building that in 10 years for under 200. But then again the Surface RT may shoot up in Value in 2025 for some insane reason as well 🤣.

Everything... what we consider expensive now, will be junk tomorrow, then exepensive the next day once word gets out via hipstertube.

Same has always been said for hardware as long as I can remember. 486's were junk in a world of Pentium2/3... then they were junk when we added another core. P4 era are still junk, but give it time.... some around here have already hinted that P4 stuff is getting expensive.... given widespread adoption of non-32bit... x86 is gonna get rare and expensive at somepoint in the future.... and then probably x64 once we are all fully ARM'ed.... it goes on.

0.02c

That depends on the p4, there are enough dimension 8100s though for everyone

I'm calling it right now: the Maxwell Titan X and its GeForce GTX 980 Ti equivalent will, in the long run, probably hold their value a bit better than their Pascal successors because they're the most powerful cards to still have native VGA output - important for those of us with Sony GDM-FW900s and other high-end CRTs to use. (Working ones, anyway. I still need to get my FW900 fixed...)

Basically, the things that shoot up in value retain a feature that gets dropped in later offerings while being the most powerful and capable to have that particular feature. If you notice that something's dropping a seemingly old "legacy" feature that may have compatibility ramifications, take notice and stock up while you still can.

It's sorta like how S3 ViRGE cards are now renowned for their 2D compatibility instead of just being the infamous "3D decelerator" since it's trivial to pair one up with a 3dfx Voodoo2 to get around that setback, and how GeForce FX cards are considered very desirable for having paletted texture support and theoretically supporting those pesky Splinter Cell shadow buffers (albeit busted past a certain driver version that only supports GeForce 4 Ti cards at most) despite being most infamous for being late to market and getting thoroughly whooped by ATI's Radeon 9x00 series at Shader Model 2.0.

X-Fi cards with the actual hardware DSP may go up in price as well because everything Sound Core3D-based afterward is inferior for PC gaming (no hardware OpenAL, SBX surround is positionally worse than CMSS-3D Headphone); I've noted the Auzentech X-Fi HomeTheater HD and Onkyo Wavio SE-300PCIE basically being unobtanium at this point, and even the Creative X-Fi Titanium HD can command surprisingly high prices.

As for P4 value, I will say that my BC875PLG industrial motherboard was NOT cheap in the slightest, though as an industrial board with a fully-functional ISA slot instead of a mass-market one, that's to be expected. Thankfully, everything else was still reasonably affordable, including the 3.2 GHz Extreme Edition I dropped in it.

Alas, I can't say the same for my Mirrored Drive Doors Power Mac G4. MDDs command a lot because they're the fastest machines that can natively boot Mac OS 9, even the FW800 ones after the chaps at Mac OS 9 Lives figured out how to do so without flashing firmware. That goes double if it's a 1.42 GHz FW800 with the copper heatsink, possibly triple if it's got some exotic expansion cards loaded like the Sonnet Tempo Trio mine had (and in some cases, a Sonnet Tempo-X for SATA support). I've also noted quad G5s going up in value, even though they lack the OS 9 compatibility factor that G4s do.

Otherwise, I can't think of anything recent that might become retro in the future - unless you count those niche AmigaOne X1000/X5000 boards, anyway. I'm not paying $1,000+ for systems that have practically no software compatibility, cost as much as a high-end gaming PC, and on top of that, have pretty much zero connection to the classic Commodore-era Amigas other than the name.

I think the Nvidia Titan GPUs and enthusiast socket boards will probably become collectible fairly soon. Some of those dual workstation xenon boards like skull trail, and maybe some of the dual graphics solutions like the 9800gx2 or the radeon 6990.

Nvidia 3D glass and maybe some of the early VR gear.

Basically anything that is expensive and weird.

NamelessPlayer wrote:

I'm calling it right now: the Maxwell Titan X and its GeForce GTX 980 Ti equivalent will, in the long run, probably hold their value a bit better than their Pascal successors because they're the most powerful cards to still have native VGA output - important for those of us with Sony GDM-FW900s and other high-end CRTs to use. (Working ones, anyway. I still need to get my FW900 fixed...)

My friend done extensive research on VGA converters because of this issue. And the best (and only one with powerful RAMDAC for his purposes) is this one from Dell:
http://www.dell.com/en-uk/work/shop/dell-vide … elds-tablet-pcs

According to his findings, it's the only one, which can drive super high resolutions or super high refresh frequencies in smaller resolutions, and it's not ghosting at all.

And regarding future retro HW, I think that dual GPUs will be valuable. It was niche market back then, not many sold, and it all but disappeared today. And I don't think, that with current low level APIs they will come back any time soon, if at all.

one day RGB will be retro

brb building a 486 with RGB fans and RGB LEDs installed in a model M

i think winxp stuff will be desired in the future

winxp was the best OS microsoft ever created. and you have drivers for it on core i5 4rth gen i belive and then the drivers were only made for win7.

besides winxp lasted many years and im sure people will want to go retro with it ..in many years

its amazing that during winxp we had the radeon9800pro and the nvidia 8800gt. Going from athlon xp to athlon 64 to core i5 4th gen

cyclone3d wrote:

A few points of stuff that has been mentioned. […]
Show full quote

A few points of stuff that has been mentioned.

Geforce 8800 series bumpgate. How do I have 5x 8800 Ultra cards that all work fine? 1 I bought by itself a while ago and retro-fitted an Arctic Accellero II on it along with a RAM/VRM cooling kit from a different company.

The other 4 I have I bought in an AS-IS lot for about $10 a piece. All 4 work just fine.

And as for the other Geforce cards in the same family I have had in the past, not a single one has died that I know of... I used to pass my old stuff down to family/friends when I was done with it. Pretty easy to keep track of things working/dying that way, especially when they come back to you for something else if something dies on them.

Then as for stuff becoming retro... Pretty much everything will be considered "retro" at some point.

Imagine my surprise when I joined vogons and found that there were people that collect Packard Bell equipment.... I couldn't stand Packard Bell stuff back in the day. Their support was horrendous compared to other companies of the same era.

And I've started collecting some industrial rack mount hardware. 386, Pentium II, Pentium IV, and I may get some more different industrial stuff if I find it at acceptable prices to me.
I even picked up a couple LGA 1156 boards because they were super cheap. The only problem is finding PICMG v1.3 backplanes for a good price. Who else collects that stuff?
If the price is right, you can make great retro machines as the number of slots available is generally amazing and that equipment is usually made to higher standards than consumer oriented hardware.

Another thing I thought I would never collect was laptops. And yet I now have a full gamut of old Sony Vaio laptops because they have full DOS sound support due to them having built in Yamaha XG chipsets that are wired with the PC/PCI link for the best possible DOS support you can get with those chipsets.
I've also got a few other old laptops as well.

I've been building and repairing computers for over 25 years now. There was a time when I would just get rid of my old hardware even though there were a few pieces I held onto all this time. Oldest I still have is an Opti 930 based ISA sound card with onboard wavetable that I bought used from an electronics store back when I was still running either an 80386 or 80486-DX266. Best soundcard I ever had as far as compatibility with all DOS games. Now I have collected as many different variations of the Opti cards with onboard wavetable that I could find.

I do have a lot of higher end soundcards in my collection now, but those old Opti cards just make me smile when I think about how long I used that one card as my main sound card.

what sony laptop is that?

can you share info?

Probably very little if any pc hardware of the recent decade will ever become 'retro' or 'collectable'. The advancements in computer technology and games of recent years are very small compared to let's say 25 years ago. Much of the recent hardware is designed for a very limited lifetime and/or repairs are impossible (and if possible very expensive). Much of it is just cheap Chinese silver / black plastic crap (just take a good look at your monitor, smartphone, pc case, laptop etc.). What makes collecting also less interesting is that only two major CPU and GPU makers are left (with one being much bigger in market cap than the other). I don't feel much has changed since the year 2000 or so. Maybe the smartphone, digital camera, high definition flatscreen tv or MP3 player were some great innovations, but other than that.. 😒 Maybe I'm just getting old and I don't see what the fuss of some NVIDIA Titan graphics card is all about..

To me the better question is -- will the recent 'really good stuff' ever become CHEAP?!

Yes, the ship has sailed on getting something like the fastest (retail) 3dfx card for cheap but if you had a time machine there was a time you could get a V5500 for cheap.... RIGHT?

I don't see things like the very best Kepler, Maxwell or Pascal cards ever being cheap pick-ups. Take the Keplers (going back 3 soon to be 4 generations) for instance.... Titan Blacks still go for $300 while Titan Zs go for 800-1000$. Is this simply because things are moving slower now than they were back then? When, if ever, do you expect to see the premium but dated cards in the 'cheap pick up' price range?

Titans (minus the titan Z) are expensive for one simple reason right now: Crypto mining.

It is not because of their ability to mine crypto currencies, they are way to inefficient to be profitable now, it is for the simple fact that most current higher end video cards are basically unobtainium for most people and the midrange card are way overpriced, if available at all. That lead to price increase or depending how you look at it stable prices for used high end cards going back 2 generations, because these are cards that people can actually buy right now.

Prices for those cards will come down eventually, but that might take another 1-2 generations, depending on how the demand for crypto mining develops. It looks rather bleak IMHO.

The Titan Z does not really count in this, it is a dual GPU card, they seemingly always command prices way above what they are worth.

Srandista wrote:

Munx wrote:

I'd say R9 290s. Great performers that got burned out by crypto miners. Can run a proprietary Mantle API. Plus the stock cooler looks friggin amazing.

You mean this one? 🤣
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5YJsMaT_AE

I'm sure this is also one of the reasons why it will be popular in the future. Nothing like making sure your neighbors know you have these and not letting them sleep by running 2 in xfire 🤣

infiniteclouds wrote:

To me the better question is -- will the recent 'really good stuff' ever become CHEAP?!

Yes, the ship has sailed on getting something like the fastest (retail) 3dfx card for cheap but if you had a time machine there was a time you could get a V5500 for cheap.... RIGHT?

I don't see things like the very best Kepler, Maxwell or Pascal cards ever being cheap pick-ups. Take the Keplers (going back 3 soon to be 4 generations) for instance.... Titan Blacks still go for $300 while Titan Zs go for 800-1000$. Is this simply because things are moving slower now than they were back then? When, if ever, do you expect to see the premium but dated cards in the 'cheap pick up' price range?

Everything gets cheap sooner or later. Even today's unobtainium was scrap once, in fact excessive scrapping explains why it's so rare now. It's all supply and demand - and that tends to mean the most desired new stuff will actually drop the hardest, as there's quite a lot of it out there and as soon as it's simply no longer interesting for new gamers in term of performance prices will plummet.

Also there's the performance per Watt thing - even if you already own stuff there comes a point that it's no longer economically sensible to run it, even if its performance is still adequate. Perhaps not something home users generally consider, but miners who have to pay for their electricity certainly do, as do datacenter managers. It's why you so frequently find perfectly servicable multi-Xeon servers in the rubbish bin, and for that matter how I once acquired an SGI Origin2000 supercomputer for EUR 0.50 (complete with original receipt for nearly EUR 1M 😜 ). This will happen with all the mining cards.

keenerb wrote:

Nobody's ever going to want this, 386 does literally everything this does but just a little better.

From my experience that's still true. Well, at least good 386s are valued more.

tpowell.ca wrote:

I think retro hardware such as 2/3/486 and even Pentium I/II/III generation computers have gained importance due to their ability to run software that newer computers cannot run well, if at all.

DOSBOX covers pretty much everything you need from a 286-486 hardware and sooner or later PCemu will make socket 7/early Slot 1 systems completely obsolete for any practical use.

infiniteclouds wrote:

Titan Blacks still go for $300 while Titan Zs go for 800-1000$

That's just blatant rip-off or oblivious seller.

The Serpent Rider wrote:

tpowell.ca wrote:

I think retro hardware such as 2/3/486 and even Pentium I/II/III generation computers have gained importance due to their ability to run software that newer computers cannot run well, if at all.

DOSBOX covers pretty much everything you need from a 286-486 hardware and sooner or later PCemu will make socket 7/early Slot 1 systems completely obsolete for any practical use.

That's not quite true.
While DOSBox has made leaps and bounds in terms of compatibility, some issues persist:

• a) It doesn't resolve our feelings of nostalgia

• b) Speed sensitive games are still an issue as cycles don't accurately represent real-world performance of actual hardware

• c) The ADLIB emulation is far from accurate or even good

• d) The GRAVIS ULTRASOUND emulation does not sound as good as the real hardware

creepingnet wrote:

But that's what we were saying about Pentium II's, III's, and 4's back in 2001 when I started? […]
Show full quote

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I'm kind of skeptical anything beyond PIII will ever be considered desireable. It's just too generic and boring.

But that's what we were saying about Pentium II's, III's, and 4's back in 2001 when I started?

That's what everyone was saying about ALL of the PC's we talk about here on VOGONS back then.....

"HAHAH, 486? What are you doing with that old Boat Anchor"
"Tandy 1000 - whatta' dinosaur!"
"286? I remember when Bill Gates called them "Braindead"
"It's just another stupid beige box with grey panels.......who wants an old 386? Dude, you need a Girlfriend!"

I think PC Nostalgia might not be as strong with future generations, but it will be there.
We all go back and try to get the things we wanted when we were kids.
[..]

I agree. Often, people want to use/own things again they grew up with. Though some of the classics seem to be universal to several generations.
Like for example, the old gray Nintendo or VHS cassettes. For some reasons, many people consider these as parts of their own culture.
Myself not excluded. For some strange reason, I'm still fascinated of 60s/70s tech/culture, for example, even though this was before my time.
Oddly enough, the wave of teenagers and twens using such vintage tech never ends (I think that's a good thing).. 😀

NamelessPlayer wrote:

Alas, I can't say the same for my Mirrored Drive Doors Power Mac G4. MDDs command a lot because they're the fastest machines that
can natively boot Mac OS 9, even the FW800 ones after the chaps at Mac OS 9 Lives figured out how to do so without flashing firmware.

Makes sense, so that's why Mr. Urushihara has/had a MDD Power Mac in his studio (interview)!
It could run things like Photoshop with all its precious plug-ins natively with a performance that's acceptable. ^^

keenerb wrote:

I really don't see any value in collecting old cellphones, although I (of course) have kept like all 20 of mine.

Most of them are completely unusable at this point. Batteries have expired and are non-replaceable, they barely work on carriers,
the application infrastructure is going and/or completely gone..

Dude, I'm still using my first GSM phone from 1996! 😀 I got a new accumulator pack for it, and still works like a charm (where I live GSM isn't gone yet).
It features the brand new SMS feature, a phone book and has a connector for an external aerial, too. Sometimes people wonder why the audio quality is so good.. 😁

Anyway, I've also got a modern smartphone with Android 4.4 because of peer pressure (everyone, literally, expects you to have got one of these nasty, little critters).
In reality, though, I don't require anything but the base features of it - Sure, I played a few games on it, ran DOSBox (one of the ports), etc.
(Speaking of DOSBox+A4.4: I had to both enable root access, as well as to fix the write privileges of external SD storage.
Otherwise, I wasn't able to use my DOS files on the SD card. 4.0.4 on my old Tablet PC didn't had this issue, gah!)
Except for a few cute games, like Cut The Rope and My Little Pony Pegasus, I didn't play much games on it yet, though.
Too cumbersome in comparison to a handheld console with real controls (except for touch-sensitive games, of course).

spiroyster wrote:

Everything... what we consider expensive now, will be junk tomorrow, then exepensive the next day once word gets out via hipstertube.

Reminds of the old antique shop joke: "What do you buy ?" - "Worthless junk." - "Okay, and what do you sell ?" - "Precious antiques!" 😀

Considering a good bit of what's talked about these days could be considered garbage when they were new, it's hard to predict. I can see grey Dell P4's making a comeback...

On the less razzy side, 2nd gen (and some high end 1st) i5's and i7's have held up better than pretty much any previous CPU IMO. Dual Nehalem/Westmeres might become popular, and you can get a two-socket standard ATX Xeon board that holds 48GB of RAM, still large by today's standards!

Does the 3D Blaster VLB go for over $~1500 on ebay because it's pre-(popular)internet? Or just because it's old and rare? I have a hard time thinking of something like that, released now, that I'd want to hold on to.