Re: Strategy on the Decline

On Wed, 29 May 2024 03:36:58 -0400, Xocyll <Xocyll@gmx.com> wrote:

Justisaur <justisaur@yahoo.com> looked up from reading the entrails of
the porn spammer to utter  "The Augury is good, the signs say:
>

On 5/25/2024 4:28 PM, Lane Larson wrote:
>

It's a horror story.  Say I come up with $3200 to buy the top end
Alienware.  I bet I'd still have to deal with lots of overheating.  What
I'd like to do is break my computer over someone's head and get in the
news, where it says that my computer was too hot and drove me mad.  I
was appalled when I got this one home and Pathfinder: Wrath of the
Righteous was used to fry an egg.  When is this shit going to stop?  I
bought too many computers in the 90s just to keep up.  My parents lost
some faith in me when I liquidated my stock portfolio to buy just
another computer.  And it's still happening!

>
Don't buy pre-made gaming computers.  You end up paying 2x (or 3x if
you're talking $3200!) what you would for a better optimized system with
cooling that works. 

>
This depends.  
A local computer shop offers prebuilts that are not bad value at all.
The caveat is they have almost no upgrade path except swapping out the
video card, since they tend to have lower end motherboards and have all
the ram slots filled already.
>
You are correct if it's brand name junk like Alienware or any other big
name, you get charged $500-1000 just to have their name on it.

I agree.

My last two PCs were pre-builts. I could have -and in the past /have/-
built my own computers, but it's just easier to have somebody else do
all the work for me. Will that motherboard fit in the case? Is the
cooling sufficient? Etc.

But of course, the price was an issue. EVERYONE knows prebuilts are
more expensive. But you know what? Not necessarily.

Oh sure, there are some boutique builders. Falcon Northwest's prices
are insane (about double anybody else) and throw in a lot unnecessary
'extras' (like being delivered in a heavy wooden crate). But I've
priced the stuff from some builders, then went out and searched for
the exact same price from retailers, and you know what? The builders
were competitive; sometimes a little more, and sometimes even a little
less than what I would pay if I bought all the components separately.

[note: that is, of course, assuming you buy from RELIABLE retailers.
Yes, I could find the components for a lot cheaper if I relied on EBay
or from sold by some six-letter company on Amazon Marketplace or from
AliExpress. But then you're never sure you're going to get what you're
promised, and that's just not the sort of hassle I'm interested in. So
in my pricing experiment, I stuck to more reliable - and admittedly
more expensive - sources. YMMV may vary depending on what level of
risk you're happy with.]

And if you're not the sort who enjoys tinkering with hardware -mixing
and matching components, figuring out how many amps your PSU /really/
needs, deciding what thermal paste is Right For You- then the value of
prebuilts absolutely skyrockets.

In the late 90s and early 2000s, the boutique pre-built market
undeniably was the overly expensive option. You'd get a LOT more bang
for your buck building it yourself. But these days? Yeah, you'll
probably pay a little more... but not as much as you might think. Even
for the boutique pre-builts, the industry has become commoditized and
prices are fairly reasonable... at least considering the hardware on
offer. No, it won't be cheap -you don't go to boutique prebuilts
because they're inexpensive but because you want performance- but the
price margin isn't as massive as some claim.