highlandsflyer
Retro Wizard
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Just did a round of upgrading PCs and such.
Got into a discussion with my nephew and he wanted to know what influenced my choices over the years.
Firstly I explained back in the day there were very few choices. Whatever you could afford!
Then I recounted my experiences trying to get various CAD, etc. apps to run quick, and the first dedicated and powerful graphics cards, etc.
Doom and such were discussed.
Finally I reached a realisation that the current crop of processors do everything I need and more, 16 gigs of ram works for most things. One SS drive and an array of fast SATA sorts my speed issues and redundancy is covered over the network to a server hooked up to an ups.
Cheap as chips too, relatively.
Just finished putting together a home theatre pc using a totally silent solution, all passive cooler, psu, gpu, mainboard and ssds. Less than £800 all in. Incredible, as it can also play all the latest games, etc.
So now I am considering retiring my old quad core warhorse and moving onto a totally silent i7 system, a one for all solution.
And now I spend more and more time using smaller screens I have bumped the 24" over to my daughter and moved back to one of my Apple displays with finer dot pitch for colour work. It seems I am wilfully 'downgrading' as my needs decrease relatively.
My point generally is that unless you are gaming or doing hefty work PCs are becoming very much like video recorders.
Just another consumer item.
Buy it, use it for three to five years and bin it.
Very soon it will be economical to build in that 3-5 year redundancy, in a unit that will perform to the expectations and delight of 90% of the population.
This could well be the death knell of the cutting edge in computing.
Am I wrong?
Got into a discussion with my nephew and he wanted to know what influenced my choices over the years.
Firstly I explained back in the day there were very few choices. Whatever you could afford!
Then I recounted my experiences trying to get various CAD, etc. apps to run quick, and the first dedicated and powerful graphics cards, etc.
Doom and such were discussed.
Finally I reached a realisation that the current crop of processors do everything I need and more, 16 gigs of ram works for most things. One SS drive and an array of fast SATA sorts my speed issues and redundancy is covered over the network to a server hooked up to an ups.
Cheap as chips too, relatively.
Just finished putting together a home theatre pc using a totally silent solution, all passive cooler, psu, gpu, mainboard and ssds. Less than £800 all in. Incredible, as it can also play all the latest games, etc.
So now I am considering retiring my old quad core warhorse and moving onto a totally silent i7 system, a one for all solution.
And now I spend more and more time using smaller screens I have bumped the 24" over to my daughter and moved back to one of my Apple displays with finer dot pitch for colour work. It seems I am wilfully 'downgrading' as my needs decrease relatively.
My point generally is that unless you are gaming or doing hefty work PCs are becoming very much like video recorders.
Just another consumer item.
Buy it, use it for three to five years and bin it.
Very soon it will be economical to build in that 3-5 year redundancy, in a unit that will perform to the expectations and delight of 90% of the population.
This could well be the death knell of the cutting edge in computing.
Am I wrong?
