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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Googer - Sunday, January 30, 2005 - link
Just kidding, a very nice article.Googer - Sunday, January 30, 2005 - link
they just renamed the site AnandsHardwareGuide.combenk - Sunday, January 30, 2005 - link
There is a superfluous space which breaks the link for the excel sheet on page 3.archcommus87 - Sunday, January 30, 2005 - link
I'm amazed that this can actually apply too much in the real world. Seems like too many numbers are fudged/made up, such as cost per day, or the quality percentages.faboloso112 - Sunday, January 30, 2005 - link
it would certainly be nice to have a plug-n-chug sorta setup so we can download the app and run it and figure out what should be our next upgrade...but nonetheless...this is a very solid article...and plus im sure that making such a prog wont exactly be the easiest thing in the world. but still...if you did make such a prog you'd be helping thousands of people make a good choice when upgrading. and if not you Kristopher...maybe Anand or even an AT member could perhaps take up this little project?once again...great article...keep up the great work!!
xsilver - Sunday, January 30, 2005 - link
right on #4 -- some noobs here may read that and go "what's a model? is it much like a supermodel?" :DPostoasted - Sunday, January 30, 2005 - link
The article reminded me of an econometric class I sat in on in college. For me, a click-thru decision menu would be more practical. Generally speaking, the menu would start with one's present computing environment and uses with time/cost analysis calculated for each performance unit-increase in efficiency.ChrisChiasson - Sunday, January 30, 2005 - link
Some of your graphs are labeled "Price to Quality", where the GeForce 6600 has the highest series range on the entire time domain. The graphs should be labeled "Quality to Price", if the GeForce is the best upgrade.1 to 2 = 0.5
2 to 1 = 2.0
...
zetto - Sunday, January 30, 2005 - link
all these stuff make my head hurt.... Give us a calculator please :Dcryptonomicon - Sunday, January 30, 2005 - link
Thanks for doing this for me in the "Buyer's Guide" so I don't have to.