Time to Build That New Desktop... Now! - RAM Prices Going Up, Best Bargain CPU!

**Patrick Norton** (0:00)
Coming up on This Week in Computer Hardware, we got a bargain CPU and a heads up on memory prices. You might want to build that new desktop now. Huawei's suing Verizon, Apple's not so cool for independent repair shops, and quite a few of you use Airdrop. All that and more coming up next on Twitch.
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**Sebastian Peak** (0:31)
Podcasts you love, from people you trust, this is TWiT.

**Patrick Norton** (0:41)
This is TWiT, This Week in Computer Hardware, episode 552 recorded on February 6th, 2020 It's time to build that new desktop right now.
Welcome to TWiT, This Week in Computer Hardware, a TWiT Weekly show that aims to bring you the most delightful, most engaging, most useful, most affordable, most expensive, most unhinged, mostly we want to bring you the most performance for the least amount of money and all sorts of other things. We're trying to keep on top of the entire hardware industry. When I say we, I'm Patrick Norton, joined by Sebastian Peak, editor in chief, PC Perr, who has an absolutely gorgeous turntable lurking over his right shoulder.

**Sebastian Peak** (1:15)
Yes. I'm told it's real wood grain.
I think they claim solid wood, but it's a laminate. It's a laminate, yeah.

**Patrick Norton** (1:26)
There's nothing wrong with medium density fiberboard for audio products until you get them wet or bump the corners against things. And then you have medium density, lumpy, chippy board, which is just depressing to think about.
Are you using that turntable or is it actually an object of art next to your cherry blossom painting?

**Sebastian Peak** (1:48)
No, I'm using it. This is my current turntable because it's a lot less extravagant than the turntables I've used in the last decade where I felt that it was not even safe to have them out with my toddler running around. So I told my wife, I have to get another turntable because I need one with like a standard hinged lid.
And I had a VPI Scout for a while and a couple of other similarly expensive turntables that don't have any kind of dust cover. And especially the Scout freaked me out. When my son was born, I'm like, I can't keep this when he starts to walk because I don't know if you know that turntable at all, it has a unipivot tone arm where the tone arm is literally balanced on what looks like a steel needle. And it's not connected to the turntable in any way.
So you bump the thing that is on it.

**Patrick Norton** (2:44)
The motor for the Scout, isn't the motor for the Scout like a separate module that you sort of place next to the Scout itself?

**Sebastian Peak** (2:53)
Yes, it's only connected to the Scout with a belt. It's an outboard motor, has a unipivot tone arm that's held by these like hair, like these little ultra thin wires that you could break.

**Patrick Norton** (3:06)
I don't know if Kevin can see the link I just dropped him. It's a beautiful turntable, it is legendary, but I can think of nothing more frightful to have with a small child around.

**Sebastian Peak** (3:16)
Yeah.

**Patrick Norton** (3:16)
Because you can make everything go wrong by touching any part of it.

**Sebastian Peak** (3:21)
You can utterly destroy it by looking at it the wrong way, I think. And I had a previous version of it that didn't have quite that wide base or the big feet they added to it. Mine had these little conical feet.
But that tone arm, man, you can just lift it up with a finger and it's off of the turntable. So, it had to go.

**Patrick Norton** (3:42)
Where's daddy's tone arm?

**Sebastian Peak** (3:44)
Right. Oh no, it's out in the backyard, half buried in the flower bed.

**Patrick Norton** (3:53)
I'm using it for my robots. Oh my goodness.
In other strange and wondrous news, that's kind of about hardware, but not generally about the hardware you're probably listening for, I was in a Radio Shack today and bought like a old school, but not as old school as I would have liked weather monitor, which always makes me happy.

**Sebastian Peak** (4:13)
Where are you that there's a Radio Shack A? I didn't know there were any left. Colorado. Interesting.

**Patrick Norton** (4:19)
There's at least one left. There's more than one left, but it was highly amusing for me to walk into a Radio Shack. Oh my goodness. For more of the news, you're actually probably here for, or to turn to the sort of hardware news you probably listened to or watched This Week in Computer Hardware 4 The general consensus is that you probably wanna buy your SSDs, your memory now, if you're thinking about building a new system. Jeremy Hellstrom pulled together a nice write-up upon PC Per. And as he points out, memory prices have been up and down and all over the place in the last couple of years. And the big news right now is that data center build-outs and 5G devices, which are mostly high-end devices which consume a tremendous amount of memory because why not put 12 gigabytes of RAM on a phone that can only use four, is starting to increase demand for memory, which means whenever memory goes, memory demand goes up, prices tend to scale.