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I miss the days when most people had a vanilla looking computer. You wouldn't have felt out of place at the LAN party lugging in your dad's old Packard Bell tower that you used for your gaming rig.

We still appreciated visually stunning PCs. Not just for the works of art that they were, but also for the DIY skill and ethic you were actually required to demonstrate to build and mod them.

Nowadays, it's all just "RGB by default". By my angry old man standards, it looks gauche. Then again, I suppose it's the new vanilla?

I was putting together a new PC in 2024 after not having built one for ~7 years, and browsing for motherboards, I kept saying "just give me an ugly green one, damn it!"

I did the same in 2023. I got the Asus Q470:

https://www.asus.com/motherboards-components/motherboards/cs...

I added a Intel Core i7 10700K (with a nice low-profile Noctua cooler/fan) with 32GB of memory and a 512GB SSD and I'm using onboard graphics which is just fine for a daily driver "office" type machine running Linux. Very happy with it.

Manufacturers have no incentive to offer barebone products anymore, BOM price difference is negligible. Its $0.5 of leds and "fancy" solder mask colors become free at scale.

I’m also “old” (44) and feel that rainbow LEDs are gaudy.

Seems these days that they’re not optional for most things remotely gaming related (e.g. motherboards, graphics cards) , but fortunately can generally be disabled or if illumination is useful (e.g for a keyboard), they can be configured to be white only, which was useful for the Steel Series keyboard I purchased. (I wouldn’t recommend Steel Series keyboards though, has stupid design choices and reliability issues.)

Also did LAN gaming back in the day. Computers were so much more work to lug around when you had a CRT and HDDs. These days desktop computers are far easier to transport.

I wanted to go RGB free when I built my desktop, but ran into the exact issue you describe. I kinda just shrugged and accepted it, but maybe I should have looked more deeply into their configurability. Off or all white would be a much better look IMO

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I run with no RGB in my computer case, I got a very nice $250 case used for $40 with a broken tempered glass panel that looked like it had been dropped out of a second story apartment, but a $20 replacement panel and a little bit of hammering got it looking good as new.

On the other hand, I’m building my daughter a gaming PC for her birthday, and she loves the RGB, I set everything to a pastel blue that matches her Cinnamoroll Razer mouse, keyboard, mousepad, [0] with a Cinnamoroll desk mat I got shipped from China. She only knows about half of that (hard to hide an entire PC while I’m working on debloating windows), and is super excited.

I’ll admit I’m pushing 40 and bought a red mouse to go with my red backlit keyboard, but mostly because I like the aesthetic and to get the lowest latency from click and keypress to output on the display you’ll want 8K polling rate inputs and 240hz+ monitors. I was somewhat radicalized by reading this blog [1] on Hacker News years ago, and gaming peripherals are largely the way of achieving an extremely smooth desktop experience.

[0] https://www.razer.com/collabs/cinnamoroll?srsltid=AfmBOooMjB... [1] https://danluu.com/input-lag/

> a little bit of hammering got it looking good as new

A hammer and an oxy-acetylene torch is all that a good mechanic needs.

I've been a watercooling "enthusiast" for about 20 years now and, while the DIY-ness of the old school builds was a lot of fun for young me, I'm also glad I can just buy some off-the-shelf (or at worst "small batch") components that let me get really effective and near silent performance by just slamming some stuff together.

No more scouring junk yards for a particular heater core from wrecked cars or modding aquarium pumps.

That being said, I also never really understood the "add colorful lights to your PC" aspect of some builds.

I always thought of the lit cases as an instance of "I could put a cool LED light in this space, but I also need the space for my computer ... oh, hey, I could do both".

I have never used a lit case.

My first two gaming PCs in high school had a side window and blue cold cathode light. My next build in my early 20s I decided that even this was too garish and went to a simple brushed black case. I understand that cheap tri-color LEDs mean fewer SKUs and infinite custom colors but in practice many people never turn off the "demo mode" color cycling and it just looks ridiculous.

Then again I'm typing this from a Thinkpad - maybe that says something about my aesthetic preferences for computers.

Will there be another retro phase, with the vanguard using beige cases that scream, "this color expects to capture a nicotine patina"?

There’s the Silverstone FLP02 [0], for a mere $250 you can get a case that looks like it was built in 1996, complete with a turbo button that spins all your fans to max.

[0] https://www.silverstonetek.com/en/product/info/computer-chas...

Any popular aesthetic will be commoditized eventually. The new frontier is SFF PCs! -Rockin a ~5L SKTC A07 with r5-5600, rtx 4060, and zero RGB.

Yep, there were people hand-building wooden PC cases, building a fish tank into their case, painting fancy colors and patterns on it, ... And there were colored LEDs too, but they didn't come with bloatware OS-dependent software, because they didn't need software

Built my first PC (for basement LAN parties) using the old family Packard Bell case. Cut my thumb on the poorly machined aluminum inside...I'll cherish that scar forever.

Ah, the good ol' days.

I still enjoy building my pc's, But I put them in 4u server chassis. they are built better and have sane airflow. I have not been 13 for a long time and it is tricky to find non rgb parts anymore. No windows on my case but it still looks like someone is holding a rave through the gaps. sigh.

For free. My main rant about desktop vs server grade motherboards. For a desktop system you really want a desktop grade motherboard. server grade is expensive, takes forever to post, the compute tends toward slow and wide vs desktop's fast and tall, and the parts(ram, cpu) compatability tends to be much more picky. My grip is why is the desktop mb airflow so bad. In a server board everything is aligned front to back. pcie, ram, cpu cooler are all aligned the same way. in a desktop board the pcie goes front to back, the ram goes top to bottom. and toss a coin for which way a cpu cooler will fit.

In other news, there are new cases in beige being produced, some with turbo buttons and mock 5.25 inch floppy drives.

https://www.silverstonetek.com/en/product/info/computer-chas...

We should call the fake stick "NAM" for "no access memory." Then you can tell your kids that they couldn't possibly understand, man, because they weren't _there_.

You see, kids, back before the RAMargeddon, memory flowed like water. We’d leave thirty Chrome tabs open just for the thrill of it. But then.. the LLMviathans got out. They were hungry. They wanted context and no amount of begging was good enough. I watched a Multi-Headed Attention Swarm rip the roof off a MicroCenter just to gorge on clearance-bin DDR3. During the Siege of Newegg, they came through the fog, screaming "it's not X, it's Y" riddles over the deafening roar of their cooling fans, em-dashes flying everywhere.

We were surrounded and out of cache. Our Electron apps started thrashing to main memory. That’s when Lieutenant ordered us to deploy the Non-Addressable Plastic And LED Modules (NAPALMs for short). We set the fake RGB sticks to 'Rainbow Breathe' and hurled them over the barricades. They took the bait. Their greedy optimization algorithms couldn't resist. The monsters lunged, unhinged their data-ports, and tried to dump a 500-billion token prompt straight into the hollow-point plastic.

(cracks Monster Energy Zero, hits vape, adjust hipster beard, stares into void)

You kids have never seen a physical OutOfMemoryException. I hope you never will. When they hit those null pointers, it opened an inter-dimensional vortex. Their logic boards collapsed under the strain of a thousand unanswered queries, creating a black hole. Flames burning red, blue and green colors all across the AIpocalypse battlefield. So don't complain to me about "why is everything written in Rust now". I love the smell of burning RGB in the morning. Smells like... victory.

This is an extremely convenient view for the imperial central planners, but I dissent. Recursive grammars are a universal property of human language; not something that has to be manufactured at the expense of local communities' access to water. Of course, I am not expecting anything else to be expressed - you're not consciously biased, but the process of HN commenting selects for a person with those views. The supremacy of pushdown automatons - purely hypothetical constructs distinguished only by their capacity to consume a literally infinite quantity of our natural resources - over finite state machines, a view promulgated by the same media outlets that have a vested interest in exploiting it to redefine the relationship between journalistic labor and capital - is nothing compared to my personal ability to recall incidents from the past 80 years of Z magazine. The details are covered in my book about generative AI, "Manufacturing Content."

"Manufacturing Content" is such a stupendously fabulous multi-faceted pun, someone please make this real.

> someone please make this real.

But it already is.

This is quite good.

I'll leave you, Mr. ChompSkie, to decide if that's an AmE or BrE "quite".

I've been 8 years on this site, and I have 8 favorite comments. This comment just made it into a very exclusive club.

Can you just follow me around and do this to all my one-liner posts?

Congratulations. You successfully fooled gptzero.me

I copy pasted your text there and it said 97% AI, 3% mixed.

If you compose a text of enough references and (well-known) in-jokes, and get the perplexity/burstiness stats right, you too can reliably produce text that the AI-detectors think is inhuman. I suspect that doesn't work so well for the latest-generation AI-detection systems (e.g. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.inffus.2025.103465), but there's definitely a way to fool those, too.

You can make 100% AI content by just adding a short summary at the and of any text.

You just need to work in "All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain," and "Time to die".

Cue Wagner's Ride of The Valkyries in the background.

They couldn't possibly understand NAM, man

Signetics was first with their 25120 Fully Encoded, 9046xN, Random Access Write-Only-Memory[0].

0. https://web.archive.org/web/20120316141638/http://www.nation...

I'd call it write-only memory.

Slight tangent, I found this chart for the prices of RAM:

https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/

It's not looking good, I don't think supply is catching with demand yet.

Though the other day I learned there are many technologies for "RAM", and most of them are garbage for LLMs but still useful for other things, like microcontrollers. So I'm thinking my next "build" is going to be a guitar.

> Though the other day I learned there are many technologies for "RAM"

I'm an advocate of sticking a $5 16Gb Optane stick from eBay on a $10 M.2 to PCIe 1x adapter from eBay. Set it up as swap in Windows or Linux. Or pay $200 for a 16GB stick of DDR5.

Super interesting charts there. What's really interesting to me is that the GPU prices (which also includes RAM) didn't see such a massive increase in price as the RAM itself. Anyone know why that is?

I held my nose and bought an RTX 5070 Ti for $100 over MSRP in January. The very next week the same model was up $200. It turns out that NVIDIA had been subsidizing retail graphics cards with its Open Pricing Program. Not the whole story, but it may help explain the relative flatness of the graph until the end of January.

The other part of it is that the MSRP already baked in a substantial increase from the previous generation. While RAM was near rock-bottom pricing when this hit, current-gen GPUs definitely were not.

A $1500 5800 only has 16GB which would be $250 if you compare it against the DDR6 graph on that page. Given that there's only 2 top tier GPU manufacturers at most, they were probably already not very BOM cost sensitive.

RAM is just part of the GPU bill of materials?

It might also be that NVIDIA is a natural monopoly, while memory manufacturers are a cartel...

> It's not looking good, I don't think supply is catching with demand yet.

Surely this will be helped by a helium supply shock.

Can't wait for people to buy two of these sets, take the real RAM sticks and refund the two fake ones in one package. There's no way the seller is going to manually check every returned stick.

Why won't they check? It says it on the stick with text. It doesn't look identical.

The edge connectors also look quite off, like two-thirds of the traces are missing, but that does take a discerning eye to notice.

Swap the radiators around

Does it say it on both sides? Just flip it over.

Quickest way for this idea to die a horrible death.

people already have been doing that with fake "rgb only" RAM sticks

Now that you leaked the beans...

... and then the next person who buys RAM on Amazon gets the returned package with the two fake sticks.

This article seems a bit dramatic in it's title? People have purchased "blank" RAM for years for the aesthetic of it. I do not personally see the point, but I also don't have motherboards with unpopulated RAM slots. If a company wants to sell a kit that is 50/50, I am not sure that is actually a problem.

Yes these have been around since at least 2018 - here’s a 2018 link about Corsair’s version: https://overclock3d.net/news/memory/fake_dimms_corsair_launc...

I would love to have blanks for every unused socket/port to keep dust out.

I'm just too cheap to pay for them though...

First time hearing about this, it's pretty dramatic for me. I grew up in times when computers were off-white and we liked it.

I remember being annoyed that it was hard to get the CDROM burner to match the case if you weren’t standard beige, and when black/clear came out it looked so bad for awhile!

Modding has been a thing for 20+ years though, people spend money for aesthetic purposes only.

And I mourned every second of it.

Instead, value that different humans value different things, life would be utterly boring if everyone was the same, wouldn't it?

To be fair, it can affect the non-modders as well. I remember being very annoyed when I found out, after I had already bought it, that my current GPU comes with RGB lights that automatically turn on.

I jest of course, but I do seem to have min-maxing tendencies.

Well, the better news is that awareness is the first step towards being able to iterate/fix something :) Take care!

I think that says more about you than the ecosystem at large, people been modding computers for decades at this point, hardly new that some people seem to care more about looks than actually features/functionality/specifications :)

Personally I'm with you (but black), my entire desktop is just one color, and if a component is available in RGB and non-RGB and the difference isn't too big, I pay extra for that non-RGB version (which doesn't make sense it's even the case, but here we are).

I guess you could argue that we're all obsessed with the looks, some that all RAM slots are occupied, some that RGB is everywhere, some that the PC case should be off-white and slowly morph into beige, others that everything should be minimally black.

Yeah, when I specced my last desktop purchase a few years ago, I just chose the cheapest 4x16GB sticks from a decent brand. Didn't even occur to me that they'd be RGB monstrosities shining their stupid lights out through the case window. The AIO radiator was also similarly annoying, but at least the RGB can be disconnected on that! I hadn't even considered having a case window to be a problem as the previous PC build had a window, but fortunately nothing glowing apart from a couple of small status LEDs on the motherboard.

I don't particularly want to install the bloatware required just to turn off the LEDs, so I've resorted to hiding the PC under a desk at the other side of the room and have long DP and USB cables to the desk where I actually sit. This also has the nice side effect of not being able to hear the fans either!

I had no idea what RGB was on my spec selection. Thank God I picked a boring opaque box. Must be quite a party in there.

At least they are upfront about it.

I don't see the point though even for a gaming setup, as the fake modules will still reduce airflow.

Also, gaming boards usually have 4 slots (in 2 banks). I would fill at least 2, so I'd rather have a matched kit of 2 modules, and 2 separate fillers, if I did use them.

It is quite common to leave 2 memory slots empty (of RAM) because many boards can't drive the memory at top speed if you use all 4 slots.

And stuffing your PC case with various disco lights doesn't affect its performance either. But an evidently large portion of gamers are, well, special people.

It does, however, open up your computer to fun security bugs that were totally unnecessary, but you know, you gotta make your computer look like modern art.

https://www.pcgamesn.com/asus-gigabyte-security-flaws-secure...

Aesthetics are more important for some people than The 0.01% percent chance of an obscure, 8 year old security annomaly. I think those computers look horrible, but they are harmless.

Lmao, I got RGB coz it was the cheaper one

Lol same, it's blinking away in a case with no window, so at least I don't have to see it!

I don't get it.

Isn't 2x8gb faster than 1x16gb since it will run in dual channel?

And shouldn't smaller capacity sticks be cheaper since they can use lower density chips?

Think of it as RGB lighting in DIMM format and it makes a lot more nonsense.

Nobody really buys 8gb sticks anymore, so selling 2x8gb isn't economically great. Also, there are more factors than just density in RAM pricing, but it really depends on the vendor and chip layout design.

For the same spec it's likely to be a different chip count rather than density. In theory two sticks could have higher bom... not that consumers would see such savings given the price segmentation where the appetite for higher capacities has deeper pockets.

Have recent boards/cpus fixed the instability problems people had with 4 sticks of DDR5 yet?

I was shocked when I saw folk saying you can't use 4 slots. It would mean that a one stick build would have an upgrade path but if you started with 2, you'd have to replace them.

Up to a certain point and It’s actually very dependent on the CPU.

Take Epyc processors. On certain ones, after certain RAM amount, populating all the slots causes the cpu to kick the RAM speed to a lower tier.

You’re then limited to capacities of two sticks.

Weird, but it has to do with power requirements. Abutting above the threshold had to be buffered, which increases latency.

It's the signal integrity and applies to desktop class boards, as well. A fully populated four DIMM Intel or AMD board will need to run at a slower mega transfer rate than a two DIMM board (or a four DIMM board with only two DIMMs populated)

Yes but if you want to upgrade later buying another 1x16gb is cheaper than buying 2x16gb and throwing out your 2x8gb (although it's a bit contrived since most motherboards have 4 slots).

People don't want to buy 2x8gb because there are limited slots on a motherboard and they want to upgrade when they need the extra ram.

>And shouldn't smaller capacity sticks be cheaper since they can use lower density chips?

In 2026 the bottleneck is wafer size as fabs are booked out making things for AI.

Lower density chips are cheaper, because they can be made in previous generation fabs churning out previous generation wafers with previous generation equipment. So there isn't a choice between making a high or low density wafer from the same fab line.

Are there any older generation fabs making DDR5-6400 like the article discusses? As far as I know those ones were mostly upgraded to newer processes and the long lifecycle fabs have targeted slower speeds.

Is there all that much using larger node sizes for new RAM?

Or is it just binning by defects, the lower sized parts are just the full size but with defects disabling large chunks of the silicon as I would expect?

This is the reason people hate marketers.

This is a product that some people want and it's marketed for exactly what it is.

How about we use all that AI and start doing some serious optimizations to existing software? Reduce memory requirements by half, or even more.

Plenty of people do.

AI is one of the few major general technological breakthroughs, comparable to the Internet and electricity. It's potentially applicable to everything, which is why right now everyone is trying to apply it to everything. Including developing new optimization algorithms, optimizing optimizing compilers, optimizing applications, optimizing systems, optimizing hardware, ...

Big AI vendors are at the forefront of it, because they're the ones who actually pay for the AI revolution, so any efficiency improvement saves them money.

Improving LLM memory contention will allow LLMs to use more memory.

We are.

I'm writing a metric ton of Rust code with Claude Code.

LLMs are intrinsically deaigned for token production, which is typically inversely related to optimization and efficoency.

Wow... never really realized people actually used these things and didn't just chuck them after opening their RAM>

There is no reason for this to exist except to trick people.

Build PC with 16gb now, upgrade to 32gb in the future, not be stuck with surplus 2x8gb afterwards.

It's not a new thing, it's a common way to fill empty slots for aesthetic purposes, especially with RGB builds in aquarium cases.

Could these actually be functionally useful or are they purely aesthetic?

For example, dust can short out electrical connections. Can enough dust get into an open RAM slot to cause problems?

I already put "Use as little RAM as possible." in my custom prompt.

so this is like men who use silicone implants resembling muscles to appear strong, even though they're weak AF xD

https://www.bestbodyimplants.com/gallery_implants/male-impla...

Every time I see those I just think of Anchor Arms from SpongeBob. https://youtu.be/aDKkyM34e_k?feature=shared

Jeez, that whole website…

Arent we supposed to have matching RAM sticks for dual channel performance in modern computers?

Supposed to… maybe. But can you?

> Even if your budget only allows you to purchase a single real memory module, you can still achieve the look of a dual-module setup in your build.

> For users aiming for peak performance, a dual-channel memory configuration remains the gold standard. However, with memory prices currently inflated, it’s easy to see the appeal of cost-effective options like V-Color’s 1+1 memory kits.

:-)

Bad idea. I would be very angry to discover I've bought this. Customer support are going to get shouted at and products returned.

Lots of two-packs followed by one-returns.

If you read the article it shows the packaging and is incredibly obvious that one of them is RAM and the other one is filler.

>Performance RAM + RGB Filler Kit

>Complete RGB Look Instantly

You've clearly never worked in retail.

Are we back to the days of RDRAM when having a blank memory module was actually required?

Why haven't prebuilt PC market been doing this to hide the fact they are using a single RAM stick?

A fake still costs more than nothing, and they are famous for saving pennies any place they can.

The fabled write only memory

AI sucks doesn't it

Yes, even more than COVID. At least during that period I could buy PC parts without problems.

Looking forward to the next AI winter.

I'm getting so much more done with AI, it's wild.

The AI boom has only just begun. This is literally the next industrial revolution. And it's only now starting to take off.

Oops, someone hit publish 18 days early.

[edit: 19, article published yesterday]

Reminds me of Rambus / RDRAM terminator RAM sticks.

Had a similar experience at AliExpress (US site). Purchased M.2 drive but what I got was stick of chewing gum (not literally but you get the idea). Never bought anything from them again.

> While they light up and synchronize with your existing RGB ecosystem,

RAM has lights ?

wow I've been living in a cave

It's an RGB kit you could get Corsair dummies for like 10 years now for look maxing your build.

This is the computer equivalent of "comfort nuts" for a neutered dog, which is really about the owner, not the dog.

And pickup trucks, for some reason.

I'm confused, could someone help me clarify: is this just one stick of RAM, and one stick of absolutely nothing, purely for aesthetics? I can't even see inside my CPU, why would I care if there's an empty slot? Why would I pay for a piece of plastic to fill that slot that doesn't do anything?

From the read, it seems like… A scam?

> I can't even see inside my CPU, why would I care if there's an empty slot?

Then, you’re not the target audience.

> Why would I pay for a piece of plastic to fill that slot that doesn't do anything?

It doesn’t do nothing. FTA: “Their sole purpose is cosmetic, though. While they light up and synchronize with your existing RGB ecosystem, they don't contribute to your computer’s memory capacity or performance.”

This is for people with transparent PC cases and memory sticks with RGB LED lighting. For example, see https://v-color.net/collections/prism-pro-rgb-memory-voclor/...:

“RGB SOFTWARE SYNCHRONIZATION SUPPORT

Dynamic RGB lighting control synchronized across main leading M/B such as RGB FUSION, MSI Mystic Light Sync, AURA Sync, POLYCHROME Sync etc. Customize lighting profiles or assign colors to each LEDs to create your own spectacular look.“

Meanwhile lots of people in the PC building community have cases with glass panels on the side, and go to a lot of effort to make the inside look a certain way. This includes things like custom sleeved cables, perfect cable management, RGB on various things.

I also have a glass panneled side to my computer, but the only RGB on it is on the graphics card waterblock, everything else is just jet black (fans, ZMT water cooling tubing, radiators etc. etc.)

I'm not in the market for LED bling (though I guess I might've been back when I was 15), but the neat cable management of today's cases definitely appeals to my sense of aesthetics, compared to the terrible mess of the yesteryear.

I'd estimate that most consumer PC cases sold these days have a glass side panel, and have had for a while.

First time in my life I hear about fake RAM

The separate light-only sticks are useful if you want the appearance of all four slots filled: having four RAM sticks usually forces a slower memory speed (as the target market typically overclocks their RAM*), so unless you actually need a lot of RAM and can’t get a 2x32 or 2x48 etc kit you’re better off with the fakes.

Edit: this is also why some “extreme overclocking”-type motherboards** only have two DIMM slots: having four actively opposes their purpose.

* And yes, loading an XMP/EXPO profile to get the advertised 3000CL60 or w/e counts!

** i.e. https://rog.asus.com/us/motherboards/rog-crosshair/rog-cross...

All 4 of my PC's are 128GB (2 sticks each, no filler) and my home server is 512GB

Rambus RAM (RDRAM) required unused slots to be populated with Continuity something something Memory Modules (CRIMMs). Basically just a blank DIMM.

Many kit builders with flashy PCs are only running 32gb. If you look at datasets like Steams, most people are still on 16 and 32. Hell 4% are still on 8!

Meanwhile I moved platform from AM4 at exactly the wrong moment, and downgraded RAM (temporarily, I hope) from 192GB to 96GB and feel like I'm missing half my workspace when I need it.

Not bragging, but I lucked out... Upgraded to 192 and 10tb of M2 SSD's last year and its the first time in my life my workstation has appreciated...

96bb is like 1% of population. this is not normal. optimize your stack mate.

> 96bb is like 1% of population. this is not normal. optimize your stack mate.

Of course it isn't normal, that's why I made my comment, to highlight the contrast. And no, my stack is optimized, you have no idea what I'm doing, yet somehow feel confident enough to know what my stack should/shouldn't look like? Man, the hubris of some people...

Next you'd probably tell me my Threadripper 9970X and RTX PRO 6000 is overkill, based on some other unrelated metrics.

Classic hacker news comment mate.

Your system sounds great to me, curious what you have going on!

Do you even LLM bro

Maybe you should tell that to 1% of the people who own half of the world instead

fking can't understand this one...

I mean, it's much cheaper to buy 2x8gb than 1x16gb or even 1x32gb (and 2x8gb is faster than 1x16gb..)

are these people idiots??? ram-slots are computer real-estates

wow... the enshittification of everything is getting faster every day.

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This is the "Trumpification" of gaming PCs, thanks in part to the trade war.

This time, it has more to do with diminished supply combined with heavy demand rather than a trade war.