Buying an Upgrade for Perspectives

March 27th, 2009 omo Posted in Reviews, Social | No Comments »

This is kind of a response to this article, mixed with my feeling about the PC enthusiast market.

It’s like the aftermarket car mod market. E-Penis as expressed through figures like breaking horsepower or consequent read speeds. And it is an undeniable part of the market forces.

On the other hand, obviously there’s a lot more to it than that. We all want a functional, speedy, well-priced computer that makes us feel good about it. Sometimes it’s about how it looks or how it fits into your den or kitchen or bed room. Sometimes it’s about the crazy case mods or that it makes no noise or it has 4 video cards. Sometimes it’s about how you can still afford to play the games you like on a dime. Sometimes it’s about an objective benchmark that adds and translates to real life value.

But the Anandtech article I linked, besides being informative about the current state of NAND-based solid state drives, also gave a good insightful look at how numbers are manipulated in disregard of real world performance due to market pandering and lack of understanding that leads to customer dissatisfaction. It’s not all; there are entire market segments in the PC enthusiast market that sells pointless wares. Some of my favorites are heatsinks of various shapes claiming one is better than the other, another is in thermal pastes and the detailed ways you can differentiate the ones that comes with Intel’s retail packaging versus what is off the shelf @ Newegg. Or the static-reducing board for high-end PCI tuners and sound cards. Or actually, PC cooling in general.

What makes all of this work isn’t that paying $5 for a tube of silicon remixes is a con, but that all of these non-OEM additions can plausably improve your computer somehow. It’s marketing nonsense. Like how an exhaust bigger than that other one can improve flow and squeeze some unimaginable amount of power from your powertrain. I don’t know.

The other point I want to raise is that, as most sensible PC hardware enthusiasts would agree, is that disk activity is the number one bottleneck of today’s PCs, from a holistic perspective. It even may be the #1 bottleneck in specific applications like gaming or video processing. It affects pretty much everything a normal person do on his computer. The hope and dreams of the profitability of the SSD revolution is big.

But it is elusive to bench. It doesn’t have one simple number that could reflect the benefits of faster random and sequental reads, and in real life application the differences are hard to measure. It poses a big marketing problem. This is why reviews matter, etc.

Props to those who care and digs into these expensive computing options.

Tags: computers