PCSP News

"How much does a server cost?" used to have a boring answer. In 2026 it has a moving one: a global memory shortage roughly doubled server DRAM prices in a single quarter, Dell and Lenovo have each raised list prices twice since December while HPE rewrote its terms so a price ca … read more

Cloud vs on-premise is usually argued with adjectives. This guide argues it with a receipt. We price one mainstream AWS instance against the equivalent refurbished Dell PowerEdge from our own catalog, add the real monthly costs of ownership — electricity at the current na … read more

SAS vs SATA vs NVMe is the first decision that shapes a server's storage: how fast each drive is, how many fit behind one controller, and what the tier costs per terabyte. SATA is the cheap, universal 6 Gb/s interface. SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) is the 12 Gb/s enterpr … read more

The open-source LLMs released in 2026 — Llama 4, Qwen 3.5, DeepSeek V4, Gemma 4, Mistral Medium 3.5, Kimi K2.6 — are now genuinely competitive with closed-API models. Teams are bringing inference in-house faster than at any point since ChatGPT launched. The questio … read more

In December 2025 we published a piece on this page arguing that waiting for hardware to get cheaper in 2026 was a bad bet, because memory and storage supply were tightening. That was a forecast. Eight months later it can be checked against the receipts — and it turned out … read more

If you priced memory a year ago and are pricing it again today, nothing about this market will look familiar. A 32 GB DDR5-6000 kit that sold for roughly $80 in mid-2025 lists between $400 and $620 today. A 32 GB DDR4-3200 kit that was a $70 afterthought now costs $25 … read more

The most common question we get about an older workstation is not what it's worth or how fast it is. It's "will it run Windows 11?" — and the answer is more interesting than yes or no, because Microsoft's requirements produce results that make no intuitive sense. A 2018 H … read more