An agonizing period for PC builders

  • Thread starter Thread starter Seth Brundle
  • Start date Start date
Bah. My computer fried last week, and instead of waiting six months
for the "next big thing" I went ahead and got what I could now. I
just bought what was basically Tom's Hadware's reference system for
the AMD 64 bit platform.

Is it already obsolete? Absolutely. Are there going to be new and
awesome technologies just around the corner? No doubt.

But you know what? It's going to take 3-6 months for those new techs
to reach the street in any sort of numbers. It'll take another year
before the nasty hidden bugs in the bios's are figured out and fixed.
It'll be a year after that before the various OS and driver patches
and updates are stable enough to take real advantage of it all.

So while everyone else is waiting, and waiting, and waiting, and then
getting frustrated or annoyed or fried, I'll be enjoying my "geeze you
coulda waited a little longer" system, running all the games and fun
stuff at max settings and having a blast. And then in three years I'll
just buy whatever's max and common all over again.

Bottom line, IMO, buy the best your money can buy NOW and have a ball
with it. The PC treadmill means you'll always be at least a gen
behind, no matter what you do. By the time real-world performance
means the difference between having fun with a game or app and not
having fun, you'll be able to do it all over again.
Click to expand...

Not to mention the bending over they'll give you when paying for the
"latest and greatest".
It's just a household appliance, meant to actually serve a practical
function.
To spend all your time chasing after some materialistic idea of the
the biggest and best is a waste of time and money.
 
LOL, true! :)


Sure, what the heck! Life is short! None of us really knows how long
we have got! The supervolcano in Yellowstone could blow at any second!
Carpe Diem!
Click to expand...

I found this an interesting discussion. But I find myself agreeing
with JAD: "I see no difference from today compared to yesteryears".
Yes, this is IMO exactly the situation we have all the time. Status
quo, there's always something on the horizon.

If you *wait* for some brand new technologies, you're going to buy
-expensive, -immature/trouble, -hot. Buying value and mature, is a
strategy that's been very good to me.
When you need an upgrade, upgrade. When you need to upgrade again,
upgrade again. That's how I see it nowadays.
For example, I never considered "waiting" for SATA. I'm still not
using SATA. Why should I? I now have SATA support anyway, even on a
$51 mobo.

Here's my impression and opinion of some new technologies:
DDR2 is going to be hot, suck the juice out of your PSU, and be
slower, until we get above 2GB and DDR666.
Why am I supposed to benefit immediately from PCIX? 3D rendition must
run inside the card anyway, for acceptable performance.
FX6800, 2 inches thick, hot and noisy, 500-550W minimum, $500-$600, -
no way!
BTX - give me a break! It's yet far from sure that others will follow
Intel on this.
And Intel doesn't have anything interesting to offer until 2006. And
about that time, we will also have the only thing I'm really looking
forward to, besides 64-bit addressing, - dual core cpus.
But hey, don't hold your breath, they'll be filthy expensive, and
Opterons for servers, to start with.

I don't really see the new technologies as much of an advantage in the
short term (except for 64-bit addressing, but I still need my
application to be ported). The 32-bit performance of A-64 is nice
already right now, of course. But why wait for 939? I've seen 754 vs
940. The A64 3400+ against FX didn't convince me dual channel is such
a big boon for A64 right now. Besides, the 939 A64s will only have
512KB L2cache.
754 dead? Well, that's the message you get a lot, on some websites.
AMD, OTH, seems intent to ramp up bus speeds on 754, and continue to
produce budget cpus on 754 (32-bit as well, for some silly,
unexplainable reason) for all foreseeable future. And what if it will
die? Will the early 939 boards support the higher HTprt speeds and
fast DDR rates that future A-64s will feature? There will always be
plenty good reasons to upgrade mobo as well. When will this lesson be
learnt?
Besides, 939 doesn't hack it either. You'll need socket 940 for the
dualcore Athlons, when they arrive. And that's a thing that is really
going to be worthwhile. But it's unlikely current 940 boards are the
ticket.
No, socket 754 SIS755, A64 2800+ to 3200+ for about $260 - $350 looks
OK to me. I get what I want, - 64-bit addressing. But I still need the
OS and app, soo...

ancra
 
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