Beating the System: The AnandTech Guide to Economic Upgrading
by Kristopher Kubicki & Jarred Walton on January 30, 2005 5:59 PM EST- Posted in
- Guides
Final Thoughts
Hopefully, it can be said that making intelligent purchasing isn't too difficult if you don't mind spending the additional time to lay the equation out. Of course, purists would argue that if it took you 2 hours to build a working model of the component pricing environment and only "saved" $2, you've just subconsciously quantified your time at $1 per hour. On the other hand, given some practice and intuition, most people can build models like these in just a few minutes.
Of course, modeling in this manner is not without limitations. The first limitation is that a typical computer user's habits can be very dynamic. It can be very difficult to quantify the Quality of several computer components without a clear indication of what applications will be used. Furthermore, it can also be very difficult to model several dependent components at a time, since relatively little performance data exists. Buying a new video card and processor combination might make more sense than buying more memory, but buying more memory might make more sense over buying each one of those components individually. Although we do our best to benchmark as much popular hardware as possible, sometimes picking relative values for Quality is not as cut and dry as we would like.
For those of you who enjoy the more theoretical and mathematical side of this buyer's guide, we may revisit this guide in the future or perhaps build more complex models using a much vaster criteria and budgets. In the meantime, feel free to try out your own ideas in the spreadsheets that we've provided. For example, let's say that you can afford $2 per day for upgrades - take it out of your food budget. This might describe an individual who likes to stay on the high end of computing performance, and suddenly, it starts to make very little sense to hold off upgrading. Just remember to adjust the quality values relative to what you currently have.
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Jedi2155 - Monday, January 31, 2005 - link
Anand should really have a VGA and a CPU chart of some sort as well! I don't really trust tomshardware all that much.But then, most of us don't anyways :P.
I like the article and its calculations tho...believe it or not....i use similar ones....
kmmatney - Monday, January 31, 2005 - link
sorry about the third post - but there is one statement that I think hits the nail on the head:"Determining the exact performance increase from a Radeon 9600 Pro to a Radeon X850XT is not something that you'll readily see published on AnandTech or anywhere else."
We can "almost" get this from Toms Hardware, from the VGA charts.
http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20041004/...
They don't have half-life 2, but there are enough benchmarks to at least allow for an informed decision. In fact, I used the article to help a friend buy a Radeon 9600 Pro, which was the best bang-for-buck at the time.
Why can't Anandtech have something similar, or the ability to create a similar graph on demand? Having the ability to chart both video card and cpu upgrades would be the ultimate tool for the upgrader.
kmmatney - Monday, January 31, 2005 - link
This article reminds me of something I always wanted. The ability to pull up benchmarks dynamically. I could put in my system specs, or select a similar procesor from a list. Untested speeds can be estimated to first order. Then I could pull up benchmarks from different video cards and compare exactly what I want.For now, I use the Toms Hardware video charts, as Anandtech doesn't have anything so comprehensive. A "Real-Time benchmark Engine" would be awesome for this.
kmmatney - Monday, January 31, 2005 - link
I'm a bit qith #19. It pains me to pay more than ~$100 for a video card. My plan was to stay with my Ti4200, but I managed to Ebay off $120 in old hardware last week, which brings my 6600GT upgrade down to an affordable $90, minus whatever nmy old card sells for. I'm definately sticking with my Athlon XP for a while, though.roostercrows - Monday, January 31, 2005 - link
excellent article kristopher, as i have had all the components for my new anandtech high end computer (except the video cards) just sitting on my bench for three months now just waiting... i can't help but think about what a price gouging graph would look like for the 6800gt pci-e sli video cards......Googer - Monday, January 31, 2005 - link
#13, I agree; but for some of us doing cost benefit analysis is part of the fun too. I really enjoy doing my mathmatics when I have the opertunity to do so. For me It is all part of the research that goes in to learning about new hardware. Its a hobby for me too.JarredWalton - Monday, January 31, 2005 - link
The point of this articles wasn't to give everyone a specific decision. Some people are always waiting for the ideal time to upgrade. If you're happy with your current computer, then by no means do you need to upgrade. If you're disappointed with performance, however, and you start thinking something like, "I'll wait for SLI..." or "X800XL is coming soon..." or soemthing similar, is it really worth the wait?That's the whole point behind the "cost to not upgrade". How much are you willing to spend per day for a better computing experience? We arbitratily chose 25 cents, but suppose you're willing to spend 50 cents or a dollar? Given the model in the spreadsheets, you can plug in various prices and estimated depreciatioin rates, and suddenly it may not look so important to wait for the X800XL or whatever.
The article certainly wasn't meant as a joke. It was intended as some reasoning behind our price guides. We don't often suggest people wait for the Next Big Thing, and the models presented here help to show why. We didn't even touch on the topic of market segmentation, which will often keep high-end parts at a higher price despite decreased production costs (witness SCSI, for example). There were plenty of other concepts that could also be applied. Hope that helps.
(I helped quite a bit with the article, so I feel I can safely put in my two cents.)
roostercrows - Monday, January 31, 2005 - link
Poser - Monday, January 31, 2005 - link
Thinking about it a bit more, I guess my situation (#19) could be wedged into the model you built pretty easily -- I don't have a Cost to Not Upgrade (CNU) of $0.25 a day, instead I have a NEGATIVE CNU. The longer I wait, the more cool gotta have 'em games will be released which I can't play on my old rig. That'll push up the value of current gen hardware.Chuckles - Sunday, January 30, 2005 - link
It looks like an interesting model. With some tweaking it looks like it may be valid for a variety of market segments. Cool.