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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arud - Sunday, January 30, 2005 - link
Poser - Sunday, January 30, 2005 - link
I've been thinking about upgrading my computer for the past 6 months or more. Gutting it, really, since once the motherboard goes, most of the other components will get upped too to prevent dumb bottlenecks -- I'm looking at around six to seven hundred dollars worth of upgrades. But, the thing that's held me back ISN'T waiting for the next big thing, or for prices to drop, it's that upgrading to Half-Life 2 or Doom 3 grade hardware is worth AT MOST $150.I love this site, I consider computer hardware to be a genuine hobby, but I can't justify to myself spending more than that on playing FPS video games. The price of a good PC gaming rig is so completely out of line with what it'd cost to just pick up an Xbox that I suspect I'll be sticking with strategy games for a very long time... that or buying a current or next gen console.
Eventually, I might find some "killer app" that is actually hardware-intensive (usably good speech recognition software with excellent OS integration?), but for the moment the only thing I do that challenges even my old 1400+ Athlon XP is gaming. I just can't bring myself to think that gaming on a PC is valuable enough to justify dropping the money.
This article was a cool read, because if nothing else, it made me think to put a number on how much I really would "value" or pay for better hardware.
Dragonbate - Sunday, January 30, 2005 - link
LOL I can't help but think this article was a farce.cosmotic - Sunday, January 30, 2005 - link
Next time maybe you should tell us what we should do. Like "If this is your setup, the average person would upgrade HERE" and give what you would upgrade to. This is like trying to sell something to some one but then never actually asking them if they want to buy it. You have all these details and then no real conclusion. When SHOULD I upgrade? I have no idea, and it's not worth my time to read all this stuff and then figure it all out. Again, a nice conclusion with a concrete example would be nice. And some else that would be nice would be like arrows on the graphs that say "this is when you should upgrade and for reason X, Y, and Z". The graphs mean nothing without an explination or point.Dranzerk - Sunday, January 30, 2005 - link
I think the single hardest part of a PC is upgrading. If we did not have PC games how many here would be running the latest hardware? I would upgrade once every 2 years, instead of buying new hardware little at a time every month to make a new pc every 6 months. lolgaidin123 - Sunday, January 30, 2005 - link
Great article! Granted most people won't actually do the formulas but this is a great article to link to when people moan about waiting for the next big thing. ;)Of course if you *need* the next big thing for the purpose you will use the computer for (ie SATAII or 802.11n) you have to wait...
Gaidin
archcommus87 - Sunday, January 30, 2005 - link
But how is this reliable? The quality percentages are for one application only and even then are very estimated. And the cost per day of one quarter of NOT upgrading can vary greatly. If I'm gaming fine just now I'm not losing out on anything by not upgrading yet.MarkM - Sunday, January 30, 2005 - link
Also, I think I might add, this is a hobby for most people, not a business. The whole point is to have fun, and sometimes the excitement of researching the new hardware is the best part. A cost/benefit analysis reduces the biggest benefit for some, the fun.MarkM - Sunday, January 30, 2005 - link
Uhh ... that was interesting. Man, I'm an ANALYST for my career, I write cost/benefit analyses all the time, and even I was skimming by the last few pages of that!The one variable you didn't figure in (I think?) was the evaluator's time. Spending hours of your time calculating whehter it's workth it to spend the extra $50 may not be cost effective, in the gneral sense of resource cost. One thing I learned very early in my career is that there is a cost/beniefit ratio even in preparing the cost/benefit. If it is a relatively minor outlay, you need to apply heuristics over full blown analysis.
Still, I think this is perhaps a good intro to peopel not used to thinking in this way.
deathwalker - Sunday, January 30, 2005 - link
Ah...the benifits of being an impulse buyer. I don't have to worry about stuff like this. If you want it...get it...trash the formulas.