Why tech is dead

[eira]

5 minutes ago, Arika S said:

Sooo: "computers are too expensive/I'm too poor to buy high end stuff, so tech is dead" is how I'm reading the OP. 

The phone you have us tech, the tablet you bought is tech. The PS4? You guessed it, tech. 

That's exactly what it is.

This whole thread is clickbait imo. 

OP is saying stuff like "it's not a question of can i afford it, it's a question of can i use it". I find this kinda funny since if you were buying/building an i7/i9 based system you probably have a good use for it (e.g. video editing, gaming) and you would probably be able to afford it.

I have no idea what OP means by "tech is dead" because it most certainly isn't. 

[KarathKasun]

4 hours ago, Sauron said:

Reprocessing plants are paid to get rid of broken hardware. It's only logical that they'd try to extract any valuable material they can. But if you think you can buy a working piece of hardware for the price of the gold it contains, you are dead wrong and I defy you to produce a reliable source that shows otherwise. @Jtalk4456 has a source, why don't you?

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a19670/refining-gold-from-old-computer-parts/

 

0.35 grams from some ram fingers and small PCB's.  You can get old workstations with 8 sticks of ram, 2 CPUs, 2 GPU's, 2-4 HDDs, in addition to a mainboard that has 7 PCIe/PCI slots, 2 CPU sockets, 8 - 16 memory slots, 10 SATA connectors, and a number of misc cables with gold plated connectors.  All for ~$100.

 

If you reprocess every single gold plated component in the system you can get nearly $100 in gold out of it.  But the process can take days, is labor intensive, and requires more than $20 in consumables.  Which is why the only places doing this kind of work can pay their workers next to nothing.  You would make more money per hour of time invested working at McDonalds.

 

People were doing this as a DIY project back when gold was at ~$1700 an ounce.

 

[Sauron]

33 minutes ago, KarathKasun said:

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a19670/refining-gold-from-old-computer-parts/

 

0.35 grams from some ram fingers and small PCB's.  You can get old workstations with 8 sticks of ram, 2 CPUs, 2 GPU's, 2-4 HDDs, in addition to a mainboard that has 7 PCIe/PCI slots, 2 CPU sockets, 8 - 16 memory slots, 10 SATA connectors, and a number of misc cables with gold plated connectors.  All for ~$100.

 

If you reprocess every single gold plated component in the system you can get nearly $100 in gold out of it.  But the process can take days, is labor intensive, and requires more than $20 in consumables.  Which is why the only places doing this kind of work can pay their workers next to nothing.  You would make more money per hour of time invested working at McDonalds.

 

People were doing this as a DIY project back when gold was at ~$1700 an ounce.

 

Did you even read your own source?

Quote

When all is said and done, Cody was about to get about a third of a gram of gold-ish metal out of the parts you see above, and even that third of a gram did not look especially pure. Best best best case scenario that might net you $10? And no matter how little you value your labor, that's almost certainly less than the cost of refining materials. This would only be profitable at huge, much-bigger-than-kitchen scale. 

He didn't get a third of a gram of pure gold. And newer parts will contain less and less gold.

[Guest]

If you don't need new hardware don't buy new hardware. I'm not very interesting in new tech as well because I'll never make use of it. Still cool to see reviews though and high end builds. I think what OP is trying to say is that you can get a pretty good gaming performance for the money with a PS4, and its cheaper than getting a PC now that can play games just as good. Used to be PC's were better for the money, but now not so much. 

[KarathKasun]

18 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Did you even read your own source?

He didn't get a third of a gram of pure gold. And newer parts will contain less and less gold.

Different methods result in different purity levels, as is noted in the actual video.  If your round down for impurities, 1/4 gram is not out of the question for actual gold recovered (~$15 value).  And those parts are not a whole system either.

 

Just in the memory slots alone you would double the amount he recovered from the memory.  Then you have nearly all of the pins inside the slots and sockets on the board, which likely adds up to the total amount he showed there and then some.  Plus the CPUs and add in cards.

 

Gold plating thickness in general has not changed over the years to a significant degree.  You have to maintain a minimum thickness to maintain an insertion/removal count standard.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Arika S said:

Sooo: "computers are too expensive/I'm too poor to buy high end stuff, so tech is dead" is how I'm reading the OP. 

The phone you have us tech, the tablet you bought is tech. The PS4? You guessed it, tech. 

I used to really hate Apple, but then people pointed out I used an iPod Touch every chance I got. 

Sometimes it all just goes in pointless circles!

[Drak3]

1 hour ago, Arika S said:

Sooo: "computers are too expensive/I'm too poor to buy high end stuff, so tech is dead" is how I'm reading the OP. 

The phone you have us tech, the tablet you bought is tech. The PS4? You guessed it, tech. 

 

 

 

How technical do you want to get with this?

[Sauron]

5 minutes ago, KarathKasun said:

Different methods result in different purity levels, as is noted in the actual video.  If your round down for impurities, 1/4 gram is not out of the question for actual gold recovered (~$15 value).  And those parts are not a whole system either.

What rest of the system? We just proved to you that the motherboard is worth about 3$. Where is your data proving that from that impure gold you can get 14$? The people in the article say 10$ MAX, that means after purification. Face it, you're pulling these claims out of your butt.

[KarathKasun]

40 minutes ago, Sauron said:

What rest of the system? We just proved to you that the motherboard is worth about 3$. Where is your data proving that from that impure gold you can get 14$? The people in the article say 10$ MAX, that means after purification. Face it, you're pulling these claims out of your butt.

Where did you prove that?  Because there was no motherboard in that video.

 

Im getting the $14 from the comparative weight difference of gold vs its contaminants and ~75% purity.  Also the 0.1 gram part that was considerably higher purity just from visual inspection, likely in the 90% range.

 

An "average" PC, going from weight and recorded averages from places that do this work, contains ~$13 of gold just in the PCBs.  Workstations generally have twice as many components compared to "average PC's", pushing the gold value to ~$26 from just the PCB's.  This is also discounting any difference in plating thickness to meet the different quality standards for the hardware, which is a thing that you can observe even in parts aimed at the enthusiast market.  So its likely that an old workstation has ~$35 worth of gold in it.

 

Then add in the gold you can recover from many of the ICs themselves, which is a considerable amount, probably in the $5 range.

 

Copper in just the PSU/cables is worth ~$4.  Add in the PCB's and that ends up at ~$8.

 

Silver from all the solder adds ~$5

 

https://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=12505

 

I find this quite funny though, as the cheaper the value gets, the more my initial point proves true.  The post I was responding to was saying that computer prices should be tied to the price of gold because they have gold in them.  The $100 figure was meant to be exaggerated to push the point home that gold was not a significant portion of the cost of a PC.

8 hours ago, Jtalk4456 said:

1. So there's so much tech you are excited about, but somehow tech is dead because you can't afford it? I think you're using the word dead where it doesn't belong.

2. Fine YOU don't need that stuff, but plenty of others do. Claiming tech is dead because YOU don't need an i9 is as silly as stating it's dead because you can't afford it

3. 

1972
>Notable computer: HP 3000
>Price tag: $95,000
>Inflation adjusted price: $541,209

Cost of gold: $70

 

1975
>Notable computer: IBM 5100 Portable Computer
>Price tag: $8,975
>Inflation adjusted price: $39,555

Cost of gold: $185

 

1982
>Notable computer: Commodore 64
>Price tag: $595
>Inflation adjusted price: $1,462

Cost of gold: $447

 

the price of a full computer SHOULD be competing with gold, since a computer has gold IN IT...

trend wise the cost of a pc is going down and the cost of gold is going up, not the other way around. You see computers being expensive, but in college i got a core 2 duo with 2gb ram and a 250 gb hdd for over a thousand. I can walk into staples right now and pick up a pentium with 4 gb ram and 1tb hdd for <300. So if anything computers are vastly cheaper

4. Then you haven't been looking very hard

5. *said a mere day after CES announcements for brand new cpus and gpus, along with plenty of other new tech that people plan to buy

 

[Giganthrax]

I'm a copywriter and I dread to think what it would be like to type long texts on a tablet. 

 

The OP just doesn't seem to understand that high end enthusiast/professional stuff has always been expensive, and seems to think that because a 5 year old console can play games, it's somehow a bad sign for the tech industry that his 5 year old PC can do the same. 

[oldSock]

In am absolutely blown away by your responses. Thanks.

 

Perhaps I should have named this "Tech is dead for the consumer" But I guess i didn't realize how passionate people are about their PCs. 

 

In many post I have seen a lot of truth. PC parts is crazy expensive, it is not just me, it is not just dedicated to a particular country. 

 

My reason for starting 2019 with mobile devices has more to do with availability then anything else. There is really not much in our local second hand store that is worth its money. Many of those systems are older then my own and there isn't many people parting with their hardware lately.  Perhaps they also feel they want to get the maximum value before they part with their components.

 

Again today i was looking at the AMD A6 Laptops. I viewed their prices vs performance. Now to be clear, the most inexpensive laptop I can find by the time I wrote this is about $400 US and it is not that wonderful. Yes it will get the work done, but the same can be said for the tablet. Also consider that the tablet itself isn't new and isn't the best. 

 

Like many of you, if i am about to spend money on a device, i want to be able to do more then just word processing. I want to be able to play a game or two. Yet many laptop manufacturers still sell laptops with no dedicated GPUs at very high prices. Just because it is a i3 current generation doesn't justify the Price of over $600 US for it. But because the second hand market has been so bad as of late, I can't say "i can build a better system" truth is i can't at this stage. That may change and the market can be flooded tomorrow with all kinds of nice stuff.

 

But for now, my old laptop had its days, my desktop system had a decade. I did get real and true value out of them. I do not regret buying them. But i cannot replace them with new hardware simply because manufacturers lost their minds. 

 

So for me, tech is dead. I have learned to use the minimum and got good at it. I don't need the next big GPU, CPU and the like. And if I am representing a handful of people then at least for us the rat race is over for now.

 

Hope you all have a awesome 2019. And who knows maybe someone will part with their hardware and i can get a nice proper upgrade. Nothing is written in stone...

 

 

[oldSock]

8 hours ago, Giganthrax said:

I'm a copywriter and I dread to think what it would be like to type long texts on a tablet. 

 

The OP just doesn't seem to understand that high end enthusiast/professional stuff has always been expensive, and seems to think that because a 5 year old console can play games, it's somehow a bad sign for the tech industry that his 5 year old PC can do the same. 

Goodness me no. My hardware had a hard life and it is my fault that there functionality is compromised. I do understand perfectly what you are saying and do agree with you. I really do.

 

Enthusiast/professional stuff was and will always be expensive. That I do understand 100% But at what stage do that high end tech role over into more affordable systems? That I haven't seen yet. It could be that the companies doesn't import that or whatever the case may be. But i do think there is enough "tech" older generation stuff that can still be very powerful add on to the basic laptop market for example.

 

And yes it is a pain to work on a tablet at times. 100% true...

[Jtalk4456]

16 hours ago, KarathKasun said:

1. 0.35 grams from some ram fingers and small PCB's. 

2. You can get old workstations with 8 sticks of ram, 2 CPUs, 2 GPU's, 2-4 HDDs, in addition to a mainboard that has 7 PCIe/PCI slots, 2 CPU sockets, 8 - 16 memory slots, 10 SATA connectors, and a number of misc cables with gold plated connectors.  If you reprocess every single gold plated component in the system you can get nearly $100 in gold out of it. 

3. People were doing this as a DIY project back when gold was at ~$1700 an ounce.

 

16 hours ago, KarathKasun said:

4. 1/4 gram is not out of the question for actual gold recovered (~$15 value).  And those parts are not a whole system either.

5. Just in the memory slots alone you would double the amount he recovered from the memory.

6. Plus the CPUs and add in cards.

7. Gold plating thickness in general has not changed over the years to a significant degree.  You have to maintain a minimum thickness to maintain an insertion/removal count standard.

 

15 hours ago, KarathKasun said:

8. Im getting the $14 from the comparative weight difference of gold vs its contaminants and ~75% purity.  Also the 0.1 gram part that was considerably higher purity just from visual inspection, likely in the 90% range. An "average" PC, going from weight and recorded averages from places that do this work, contains ~$13 of gold just in the PCBs.

9. Workstations generally have twice as many components compared to "average PC's", pushing the gold value to ~$26 from just the PCB's.

10. This is also discounting any difference in plating thickness to meet the different quality standards for the hardware, which is a thing that you can observe even in parts aimed at the enthusiast market.  So its likely that an old workstation has ~$35 worth of gold in it.

11. Then add in the gold you can recover from many of the ICs themselves, which is a considerable amount, probably in the $5 range.

Copper in just the PSU/cables is worth ~$4.  Add in the PCB's and that ends up at ~$8.

Silver from all the solder adds ~$5

12. The post I was responding to was saying that computer prices should be tied to the price of gold because they have gold in them.

1. SOME ram fingers? Try dozens of ram fingers, a few computers worth of gold plated contacts

2. 8-16 memory sockets? what are you talking about? Standard motherboards have 4, 8 in high ends and servers, definitely not 16 in a typical old workstation...

Also the amount of gold in a sata connector is a fraction of that in ram fingers. You're way overvaluing the amount of gold in a computer, and the weird part is you gave numbers of your own and it doesn't even remotely resemble $100

3. People still do this as a hobby, but what you're missing is they're not buying $100 computers, they're going on ebay and finding bulk old electronics for pennies on the dollar and still barely making a profit

4. Pretending you didn't pull that estimate out of thin air, that's a far cry from $100

5. Nope, that was a few dozen ram sticks there, so split that in half to cover the ram and the socket, since pins will match and should roughly have the same amount of gold between stick and socket. I'm gonna take a guess and say it looked like 30 pcs there, so that's roughly worth 15 sockets with ram in them. Given most computers have 4 slots and most servers have 8, that's between 2-4 computers worth of ram and ram sockets. take that 15 and take out what part came from the circuit boards, not sure what the ratio is there. 15-circuit boards worth/2-4 computers is how much you're talking about, so yeah. 

6. CPU's have a decent amount, but honestly they are more valuable to resell as a cpu if not broken. Add in cards aren't really that often used anymore and they'll likely be a 1x pci connection with barely any cold to speak of

7. Any sources of this? Also reference the argument about lessened purity affecting the value, not just thickness.

8. I mean I can say a bunch of nice words too, but without any math corroborating the numbers I'm flinging out, it means nothing. I've done the math with YOUR OWN quoted weight of 1/3 gram of gold in a PC. It does not make $100. And you haven't given any source showing that one mobo has $13 worth of gold. I have posted a source that says that is plain wrong. your only source is a video of dozens of ram sticks and you're trying to equate that to something it's not, and even then the math doesn't follow your assumptions.

9. Twice as many components? I think you need your eyes checked... i'm not even going to bother with sources to prove the absurdity of that statement. Find a typical workstation with twice as many components, post it here, lets see it. You wanna make claims like that, then be able to back them up.

10. I could have sworn you just earlier argued that "Gold plating thickness in general has not changed over the years to a significant degree.  You have to maintain a minimum thickness to maintain an insertion/removal count standard." Also another example of you pulling random numbers out of thin air with nothing to back them up

11. just to clarify, are you talking standard microchips like these when you refer to IC's?

if so i'm not sure where you think all that gold value is coming from... There is some amount of gold in them but barely any at all. Certainly not $5

Any sources to back the other two numbers? Also you're talking scrapping solder off the motherboard, which is a whole different level of work than clipping some connector fingers... And you're trying to argue the higher values you're pulling out of your hat as adding up to the $100 you mentioned. First off, it doesn't add up to 100 even in your overshot numbers. Second, you have no backing for those numbers. Third you said $100 worth of gold, not gold silver and copper and god knows what else you'll try to put in there.

12. It most certainly didn't say ANYTHING about the prices being TIED. I said the word competing in reference to the original quote about when the price of a computer is competing with the price of gold. I said it should compete, because the price of a computer should be much HIGHER than the cost of one of the raw materials in it. no one said the prices should be the same because one has the other in it.

 

 

 

 

[KarathKasun]

On ‎1‎/‎11‎/‎2019 at 8:27 AM, Jtalk4456 said:

 

 

1. SOME ram fingers? Try dozens of ram fingers, a few computers worth of gold plated contacts

2. 8-16 memory sockets? what are you talking about? Standard motherboards have 4, 8 in high ends and servers, definitely not 16 in a typical old workstation...

Also the amount of gold in a sata connector is a fraction of that in ram fingers. You're way overvaluing the amount of gold in a computer, and the weird part is you gave numbers of your own and it doesn't even remotely resemble $100

3. People still do this as a hobby, but what you're missing is they're not buying $100 computers, they're going on ebay and finding bulk old electronics for pennies on the dollar and still barely making a profit

4. Pretending you didn't pull that estimate out of thin air, that's a far cry from $100

5. Nope, that was a few dozen ram sticks there, so split that in half to cover the ram and the socket, since pins will match and should roughly have the same amount of gold between stick and socket. I'm gonna take a guess and say it looked like 30 pcs there, so that's roughly worth 15 sockets with ram in them. Given most computers have 4 slots and most servers have 8, that's between 2-4 computers worth of ram and ram sockets. take that 15 and take out what part came from the circuit boards, not sure what the ratio is there. 15-circuit boards worth/2-4 computers is how much you're talking about, so yeah. 

6. CPU's have a decent amount, but honestly they are more valuable to resell as a cpu if not broken. Add in cards aren't really that often used anymore and they'll likely be a 1x pci connection with barely any cold to speak of

7. Any sources of this? Also reference the argument about lessened purity affecting the value, not just thickness.

8. I mean I can say a bunch of nice words too, but without any math corroborating the numbers I'm flinging out, it means nothing. I've done the math with YOUR OWN quoted weight of 1/3 gram of gold in a PC. It does not make $100. And you haven't given any source showing that one mobo has $13 worth of gold. I have posted a source that says that is plain wrong. your only source is a video of dozens of ram sticks and you're trying to equate that to something it's not, and even then the math doesn't follow your assumptions.

9. Twice as many components? I think you need your eyes checked... i'm not even going to bother with sources to prove the absurdity of that statement. Find a typical workstation with twice as many components, post it here, lets see it. You wanna make claims like that, then be able to back them up.

10. I could have sworn you just earlier argued that "Gold plating thickness in general has not changed over the years to a significant degree.  You have to maintain a minimum thickness to maintain an insertion/removal count standard." Also another example of you pulling random numbers out of thin air with nothing to back them up

11. just to clarify, are you talking standard microchips like these when you refer to IC's?

if so i'm not sure where you think all that gold value is coming from... There is some amount of gold in them but barely any at all. Certainly not $5

Any sources to back the other two numbers? Also you're talking scrapping solder off the motherboard, which is a whole different level of work than clipping some connector fingers... And you're trying to argue the higher values you're pulling out of your hat as adding up to the $100 you mentioned. First off, it doesn't add up to 100 even in your overshot numbers. Second, you have no backing for those numbers. Third you said $100 worth of gold, not gold silver and copper and god knows what else you'll try to put in there.

12. It most certainly didn't say ANYTHING about the prices being TIED. I said the word competing in reference to the original quote about when the price of a computer is competing with the price of gold. I said it should compete, because the price of a computer should be much HIGHER than the cost of one of the raw materials in it. no one said the prices should be the same because one has the other in it.

 

 

 

 

1. Divide what he has there by 2 to get how many modules worth that is.  Workstations can come with 16+ total modules, giving 32 finger sets as he had them prepared (you get a set of 2 fingers from a single module).

 

2. When the workstation has ~12 SATA headers, you end up with as much as ~2 DIMM slots.  I have trash server boards with 24+ DIMM slots.  Many servers can have 4 modules per channel or more.

 

5. Servers have more than 8 DIMMs, especially old ones...  https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/archive/Xeon1333/5400/X7DWN_.cfm

 

6. 1st gen Core 2 quad based Xeon CPUs go for less than $10 on the open market.

 

8. The link is there, you just need to click on it.

 

9. Two CPUs, double the memory slots, double the x16 slots (possibly quadruple), usually multiple HDDs, larger PSUs, multiple GPUs, RAID controllers... so yeah, double the components and thus double the interconnect (where the gold is) count.

 

 

10. Unless you are talking about consumer goods, the gold plating thickness has been relatively static for the reasons I listed for the past 20 years.  You can go back to very old mainframes from the 70's and 80's and find significantly more gold per square mm, but that is 40-50 years ago.

 

11. Talking about ALL of the IC's, including NB/SB, internal CPU package, FETs... everything.

 

12. 

Quote

the price of a full computer SHOULD be competing with gold, since a computer has gold IN IT

This implies that the price of a full computer should be similar to the market price of gold, which has not been anywhere near the truth.

 

The BOM for a basic PC (business desktop, just the PC) today is under $150, If you take all of the margins out of it.  I mean, I can buy a NEW business desktop for ~$220 at a brick and mortar store.  With monitor and peripherals the total cost is maybe $300.

[dizmo]

No, tech isn't dead. I honestly don't get most of your reasoning, really, so I'll tackle them one by one.

 

You say you're surrounded by budget tech stuff, because it's "too expensive." That's a personal problem, and by no means affects the majority as a whole. You use the i9 as an example, which is the top of the stack. Why? That's not a chip the masses are going to be buying anyway. That's an elite product, meant for the few that have the funds to purchase it.

 

$400 for a complete system isn't terrible. You're also looking at a builder, who's going to include extra costs and fees to cover overhead, building, etc. You also state, yet again, that where you live has high import tax; which again affects only you and those around you, it is not systemic in tech in general. Again, you state how you only use computers for simple tasks. That's great, but if that's the case, honestly the i3 is all you need. You don't need an i9, and it'd be a foolish purchase for you to make. This theory is only strengthened by you stating you can get away with a phone and PS4 for your uses.

 

Something you need to consider, is that tech has advanced. So, what used to be top tier many years ago is now entry level. The 8th gen i3 is better in a lot of ways than the 7th gen i5, for example.

 

Tech has always competed with gold prices. You could always buy a high end system for thousands of dollars. I simply don't understand what point you're trying to make.

You know what's never been true? That tech increases in value. Truth be told, there are very, very few things in life that do increase in value.

Tell me, will buying gold help you make word documents? Will gold play games with your friends? Nope. So that point is completely irrelevant.

 

Quote

Owning the newest laptop isn't all that wonderful, buying a new phone isn't really a priority. Doing water cooling on everything isn't really a good idea anymore. In short spending money on tech in general isn't what it once was.

You know what this statement is? Entirely personal. It's dead to you, and you seem to be trying to push that onto everyone else. There are still many, many many tens of thousands of people who are still into all of these things.

 

Honestly, what this seems to me is a rant from someone who hasn't been the most fortunate when it comes to personal finances, and can't afford the toys they want.

[Antoine Kamarovszki]

1st world problems, yay

[chiller15]

I haven't read through this entire thread, though I did read the OP. However I think the OP is being a bit naieve. Top/high end technology in any industry has always been very expensive and out of reach for most consumers. This has always been the case and always will be.

 

Most new technologies are sold at a high price because the company wants high margins to recoop R&D, manufacturing, sales/advertising costs (and others). After a couple of years, prices drop down to more affordable levels as the items become more accessible and the margins are less. By that time, the company will have already developed/released a newer high end product and thus restarting the cycle.

 

TVs are a prime and easy example to look at. 4K TVs were extremely expensive when the technology was new. Now you can pick up a 4K TV for a few hundred.

[GoldenLag]

On 1/10/2019 at 9:37 PM, KarathKasun said:

-snip-

 

9 hours ago, KarathKasun said:

-snip-

wait. wasnt the original argument over the cost of gold in a PC? shouldnt you be using new components and new price instead of used price?

 

i mean eventually something gets cheap enough that Gold price catches up to it. (gold doesnt really drop in value like tech does)

On 1/10/2019 at 11:32 PM, KarathKasun said:

The $100 figure was meant to be exaggerated to push the point home that gold was not a significant portion of the cost of a PC.

i mean, we have sort of moved on from the 1 guy who mentioned this earlier. the significant cost these days is the cost of silicon. the amount of money poured into creating bleeding edge tech is so high that companies charge what they have to to move to the next product. once the product becomes end-of-life it drops dramatically in price. and the price we pay honestly isnt all that much due to the economy of scale. 

 

ive lost you so many times in this thread. you argue tech is dead, yet you contradict yourself. You say things are too expencive when it really isnt. 

[Peskanova]

On 1/11/2019 at 11:26 AM, oldSock said:

In am absolutely blown away by your responses. Thanks.

 

Perhaps I should have named this "Tech is dead for the consumer" But I guess i didn't realize how passionate people are about their PCs. 

 

 In many post I have seen a lot of truth. PC parts is crazy expensive, it is not just me, it is not just dedicated to a particular country. 

 

My reason for starting 2019 with mobile devices has more to do with availability then anything else. There is really not much in our local second hand store that is worth its money. Many of those systems are older then my own and there isn't many people parting with their hardware lately.  Perhaps they also feel they want to get the maximum value before they part with their components.

 

Again today i was looking at the AMD A6 Laptops. I viewed their prices vs performance. Now to be clear, the most inexpensive laptop I can find by the time I wrote this is about $400 US and it is not that wonderful. Yes it will get the work done, but the same can be said for the tablet. Also consider that the tablet itself isn't new and isn't the best. 

 

Like many of you, if i am about to spend money on a device, i want to be able to do more then just word processing. I want to be able to play a game or two. Yet many laptop manufacturers still sell laptops with no dedicated GPUs at very high prices. Just because it is a i3 current generation doesn't justify the Price of over $600 US for it. But because the second hand market has been so bad as of late, I can't say "i can build a better system" truth is i can't at this stage. That may change and the market can be flooded tomorrow with all kinds of nice stuff.

 

But for now, my old laptop had its days, my desktop system had a decade. I did get real and true value out of them. I do not regret buying them. But i cannot replace them with new hardware simply because manufacturers lost their minds. 

 

So for me, tech is dead. I have learned to use the minimum and got good at it. I don't need the next big GPU, CPU and the like. And if I am representing a handful of people then at least for us the rat race is over for now.

 

Hope you all have a awesome 2019. And who knows maybe someone will part with their hardware and i can get a nice proper upgrade. Nothing is written in stone...

 

 

Tech is dead?, Its just a matter of priorities, I would spend 1k more on my pc to be full "techy" than spend 1k more on fashion or on a car even a smartphone, I allways tell when people tell me oh 2000$ computer (1,2k on computer 500 on monitor rest on periph) well , how much is your phone? 800$? , how many do you have per pc bought?.... mine 200$, your purse? your shoes? mines are confortable but not nike or addidas, your car? My focus on cars are low fuel consuption to spend less. Just priorities, I wont spend 5k on a OLED TV but I would do on a computer.

Tech is not expensive, tech is like any hobby u take, You can be premium and spend 6k on a pc or be bang for buck and spend 600$ and there's a lot of middleground. But like all in life.

[CharminUltraStrong]

On 1/10/2019 at 8:44 AM, KarathKasun said:

No, a high end system used to cost ~$1500.  Now a high end system can cost $3000+++.

#1 Inflation

#2 Mid range, $1,500 USD systems today trump the high end $1,500 systems of some years ago. 140hz is quickly becoming the new 60hz, it's only a matter of time before 60hz is found on only the most lowend displays.

[KarathKasun]

5 hours ago, CharminUltraStrong said:

#1 Inflation

#2 Mid range, $1,500 USD systems today trump the high end $1,500 systems of some years ago. 140hz is quickly becoming the new 60hz, it's only a matter of time before 60hz is found on only the most lowend displays.

Inflation is not that high.

 

100hz was normal back in the 90's.  60hz only became a limitation when LCDs displaced CRTs.  People used to play competitive shooters on high end rigs with all details manually dialed back to the point that the game had no textures to get ~150 FPS.

[CharminUltraStrong]

5 minutes ago, KarathKasun said:

Inflation is not that high.

 

100hz was normal back in the 90's.  60hz only became a limitation when LCDs displaced CRTs.  People used to play competitive shooters on high end rigs with all details manually dialed back to the point that the game had no textures to get ~150 FPS.

100hz was normal before CRT's were replaced, yes but I don't see anyone switching out their 60hz LCD's for "Gaming CRT"s". Also, what is high end to you, Core i9 with titans? You can build a system with an RTX 2080 for  1,500 USD and under.

[KarathKasun]

1 minute ago, CharminUltraStrong said:

100hz was normal before CRT's were replaced, yes but I don't see anyone switching out their 60hz LCD's for "Gaming CRT"s". Also, what is high end to you, Core i9 with titans? You can build a system with an RTX 2080 for  1,500 USD and under.

At the time those systems existed, 120-200hz was a thing, your statement seems to imply otherwise.  A $1500 system back then could push over 100hz and the display would support it.  And yes, there are people picking up and refurbing old CRTs to replace LCDs for specific types of gaming.

 

High end is literally top of the product stack components.  At that time, the "titan" tier graphics cards cost $500 (2080 tier was $250) and i9 tier CPUs topped out at $999.  You could put together a budget gaming rig for $350.

 

If you want to claim inflation, the difference is only about 33%.  Titan should cost ~$700 and the top HEDT i9 should cost ~$1400.  Entry level systems are about spot on for inflation, high end rigs are not.

[CharminUltraStrong]

4 minutes ago, KarathKasun said:

At the time those systems existed, 120-200hz was a thing, your statement seems to imply otherwise.  A $1500 system back then could push over 100hz and the display would support it.  And yes, there are people picking up and refurbing old CRTs to replace LCDs for specific types of gaming.

 

High end is literally top of the product stack components.  At that time, the "titan" tier graphics cards cost $500 (2080 tier was $250) and i9 tier CPUs topped out at $999.  You could put together a budget gaming rig for $350.

 

If you want to claim inflation, the difference is only about 33%.  Titan should cost ~$700 and the top HEDT i9 should cost ~$1400.  Entry level systems are about spot on for inflation, high end rigs are not.

But as generations progress, your mid range cards become so good that they're, effectively, the high end replacement. 980ti was top of the product stack at one point for gaming, the 1070 has the same or better performance.  1070's were the same price or LESS than a 980ti. Hell, 1070's beat out the old Titans which cost 1,000+ USD back when they were new in 2013 with only the Titan X putting up a fight against the 1070. Even better is that the 1080 beats out a Titan X so with ever progressing performance comes ever progressing pricing and evolving product stacks.

[KarathKasun]

2 minutes ago, CharminUltraStrong said:

But as generations progress, your mid range cards become so good that they're, effectively, the high end replacement. 980ti was top of the product stack at one point for gaming, the 1070 has the same or better performance.  1070's were the same price or LESS than a 980ti. Hell, 1070's beat out the old Titans which cost 1,000+ USD back when they were new in 2013 with only the Titan X putting up a fight against the 1070. Even better is that the 1080 beats out a Titan X so with ever progressing performance comes ever progressing pricing and evolving product stacks.

This happened in the late 2000's and early 2010's (100% performance increases gen to gen).  Prices still did not go up.  Top of the product stack was still $500, even though it was double the performance of the old $500 card.