High End PC Builds Bore Me

[AshleyAshes]

I love Scrapyard Wars and that's for one reason: Because high end PC builds are boring.  What do you have to do to make a high end PC build?  Spend a lot of money.  As long as you have the money, you can put it together.  Boring.

 

I love seeing people bargain and scrap and improvise to put a machine together.  I love seeing how well an i5 2500K can perform even today if you pair it with a decent graphics card.  I love seeing what graphics cards can still be competitive in todays popular games like CS:GO or LOL.  I love seeing 'Older but pretty okay' PC parts have life put into them instead of getting tossed into the dumpster.  There's so many ways to repurpose or revive hardware and that is the most interesting thing in PCs I think.  Keeping build prices low by avoiding the newest shinies.

 

Even for myself, I've wanted to do an ITX build but had no motivation to build some 'new' ITX build for the fun of it.  Then I came across an Intel Socket G2 ITX mobo that would take the CPU from my six year old Sandy Bridge Mobile -Laptop-.  Rebuild my laptop into a desktop I replace the laptop?  And that ITX build will be Sandy Bridge with four cores, hyper threading, and ready for any big fat graphics card?  Now that's the kind of stuff that's fun to see and build.

 

I get the appeal of 'High End Builds'.  People love to see raw high specs.  They want to see someone build something that they couldn't afford to build themselves.  There's the fantasy and power of it.  I'd prefer the approach like seen in golf, the less strokes needed to reach the hole the better.

[Fetzie]

My brother is currently playing games on a Core2duo E8400 with 2GB DDR2 and a GTX 750ti until he has enough money to get a new computer.

[Bananasplit_00]

i cant afford high end stuff, mainly because i snatch every deal i can when i see them for used hardware i can afford lol, building PCs is so much fun and finding the deals is half of it

[afklinus]

1 hour ago, AshleyAshes said:

I love Scrapyard Wars and that's for one reason: Because high end PC builds are boring.  What do you have to do to make a high end PC build?  Spend a lot of money.  As long as you have the money, you can put it together.  Boring.

 

I love seeing people bargain and scrap and improvise to put a machine together.  I love seeing how well an i5 2500K can perform even today if you pair it with a decent graphics card.  I love seeing what graphics cards can still be competitive in todays popular games like CS:GO or LOL.  I love seeing 'Older but pretty okay' PC parts have life put into them instead of getting tossed into the dumpster.  There's so many ways to repurpose or revive hardware and that is the most interesting thing in PCs I think.  Keeping build prices low by avoiding the newest shinies.

 

Even for myself, I've wanted to do an ITX build but had no motivation to build some 'new' ITX build for the fun of it.  Then I came across an Intel Socket G2 ITX mobo that would take the CPU from my six year old Sandy Bridge Mobile -Laptop-.  Rebuild my laptop into a desktop I replace the laptop?  And that ITX build will be Sandy Bridge with four cores, hyper threading, and ready for any big fat graphics card?  Now that's the kind of stuff that's fun to see and build.

 

I get the appeal of 'High End Builds'.  People love to see raw high specs.  They want to see someone build something that they couldn't afford to build themselves.  There's the fantasy and power of it.  I'd prefer the approach like seen in golf, the less strokes needed to reach the hole the better.

I would love to see linus and luke do a build like this. Scrapyward wars is interesting but i dont think its the hardware that makes it interesting IMO its the cases. Id like to see them do a "Hack Yard Wars" where they are wiring together and literally piecing the builds together from scrap components that probably shouldnt work together. 

[Wrb]

They bore me as the are all the same, i7 6xxx and a gtx 10xx. It's all the same and there's nothing exciting and different. Thats one of the reasons my 'rig' has an A10 7870k APU in it and no graphics card.

[Space Reptile]

budget builds are way more interesting per se , if you look at a "best of the best" building competition everything is just another 6700k + a 1080 ,

its like modern formula 1 same cars , tonns of regulations that that the rng out (only allowed to overtake when we say so , no refueling , one set of tires , BOOOORING ) 

 

w/ something like a tight budget and no presets besides lets say watercooling its always different and much more fun 

 

i made a 200€ build for a friend , its much more fun than having a budget of 2000€ 

[SLAYR]

I completely agree.

 

When I got started with building computers quad SLI, and top and line cpus with custom waterloops were cool, but they have gotten stale since very single high end builds all looks the same, not a lot of people take the time to even mod a case, or personalize a build.

 

Even custom water cooling is pretty boring now, and isn't really even that custom anymore, it is all mass produced parts just stuck together like legos there is almost no individuality to it. 

 

[Mira Yurizaki]

I find high end stuff boring because it's always there, it's always being talked about. Nobody talks about the lower end and because of that, I find that a lot of people become misinformed of their true capabilities. Like if you mention "Pentium", people who have high-end builds shrink and make it sound like you suggested baby-killing or something.

 

I saw a review of the Pentium G4400, it's a surprisingly good performer in games, albeit with a good graphics card. But nonetheless, the power is there.

[AshleyAshes]

1 minute ago, M.Yurizaki said:

I find high end stuff boring because it's always there, it's always being talked about. Nobody talks about the lower end and because of that, I find that a lot of people become misinformed of their true capabilities. Like if you mention "Pentium", people who have high-end builds shrink and make it sound like you suggested baby-killing or something.

 

I saw a review of the Pentium G4400, it's a surprisingly good performer in games, albeit with a good graphics card. But nonetheless, the power is there.

The 3GB Radeon HD 7950 I bought three years ago for my workstation that has been hand-me-downed to my livingroom HTPC has no problem trumping the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 when it comes to PC gaming on the TV.   (Though Neo and Scorpio will change that! D: )  It may not be the newest GPU but it's no slouch and it's fine for midlevel 1080p gaming on the television.  A lot of hardware can live long lives if it's given the right purpose.

[BuckGup]

20 minutes ago, Wrb said:

They bore me as the are all the same, i7 6xxx and a gtx 10xx. It's all the same and there's nothing exciting and different. Thats one of the reasons my 'rig' has an A10 7870k APU in it and no graphics card.

Sounds like someone who can't afford things would say. High end rigs are the best. You get the best color schemes, looks, and coolers. Might be AIO, custom or air. Usually companies slap the best on their flagship cards. I would consider i7 6700K and a 1070 boring but a quad Titan XP and 6950X is amazing

[Mira Yurizaki]

Funny thing is there's a topic somewhere else about someone wanting to get an Atom based Windows tablet and lots of people think Atoms are still POSes that struggle to do the most basic things even though that's not really the case any more. I had an Atom Windows tablet for a while, they're great for basic use.

 

19 minutes ago, SamStrecker said:

Sounds like someone who can't afford things would say. High end rigs are the best. You get the best color schemes, looks, and coolers. Might be AIO, custom or air. Usually companies slap the best on their flagship cards. I would consider i7 6700K and a 1070 boring but a quad Titan XP and 6950X is amazing

I wouldn't find that boring, but I would find that more like "Why?" Running games on that kind of a machine is like the equivalent of getting a six figure car and using it as a daily commuter.

[Space Reptile]

30 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

I saw a review of the Pentium G4400, it's a surprisingly good performer in games, albeit with a good graphics card. But nonetheless, the power is there.

the 200€ build i mentioned has a G3250 and a GTX 750 , runs witcher 1 on max and skyrim on ultra , both over 60fps , its a  pretty good pc for the budget 

people forget that modern Pentiums have the same cores as the I7´s , just lower clocks and no HT , ipc is pretty much the same 

[Mira Yurizaki]

4 minutes ago, Space Reptile said:

the 200€ build i mentioned has a G3250 and a GTX 750 , runs witcher 1 on max and skyrim on ultra , both over 60fps , its a  pretty good pc for the budget 

people forget that modern Pentiums have the same cores as the I7´s , just lower clocks and no HT , ipc is pretty much the same 

And most games don't really require a whole lot of CPU power. Multiplatform games still have to run on what amounts to netbook class processors on the consoles. Even though there's 8 cores, that doesn't mean anything when each of those cores are dinky. It's like saying a 1000cc V8 is better than a 2.5L V6 because there's more cylinders in the V8.

[BuckGup]

10 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

Funny thing is there's a topic somewhere else about someone wanting to get an Atom based Windows tablet and lots of people think Atoms are still POSes that struggle to do the most basic things even though that's not really the case any more. I had an Atom Windows tablet for a while, they're great for basic use.

 

I wouldn't find that boring, but I would find that more like "Why?" Running games on that kind of a machine is like the equivalent of getting a six figure car and using it as a daily commuter.

But what if the person uses it for rendering using octane? There is a dude on the forum who has 8 980tis

[AshleyAshes]

27 minutes ago, SamStrecker said:

Sounds like someone who can't afford things would say. High end rigs are the best. You get the best color schemes, looks, and coolers.

And that sounds like something someone who is only interested in spending money on making something look shiny and is threatened by anyone with alternative interests would say.

 

Personally, I'd have way more fun watching someone kit bash and repurpose an old recycled Dell/HP/Lenovo/Whatever tower into a SOHO NAS using what ever additional odds and ends and drive mount adaptors were necessary and then adding the necessary open source software (NAS4Free, FreeNAS, UnRAID) and seeing how cheaply that can be built compared to buying an off the shelf 2-4 drive NAS appliance, then I would seeing someone build some expensive rack mount storage server with 22 core Xeons.

 

Granted, I only make a decent wage, have less than $10 000 in total debt load and have no financial dependents, so I'm probably just 'Someone who can't afford things', so what would I know?

[AshleyAshes]

3 minutes ago, SamStrecker said:

But what if the person uses it for rendering using octane? There is a dude on the forum who has 8 980tis

That is the stupidest attempted counter point I've seen...  You might as well counter someone wanting to buy a smart car with "BUT WHAT IF THEY WANT TO WIN THE INDY 500!!??  WHAT THEN!?" 

[Mira Yurizaki]

2 minutes ago, SamStrecker said:

But what if the person uses it for rendering using octane? There is a dude on the forum who has 8 980tis

Then he has a practical use for it, but since I don't really care about that field it's not really that amazing to me.

 

Here's my outlook though. The thing with lower end stuff is it pushes software developers to come up with clever ideas. A lot of techniques you see used in games today were developed originally to get around the limitations of consoles at the time. The most famous example I like to use is deferred lighting originated on the Xbox. I don't think it came to PCs until at least the next generation of game engines after that.

 

To me targeting the highest end represents brute force, inelegance, etc. They just thought "well it has a lot of power so lets use whatever works" rather than "we need to squeeze out an extra milisecond out of this algorithm (which in video games, that's a lot of time)"

[BuckGup]

9 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

Then he has a practical use for it, but since I don't really care about that field it's not really that amazing to me.

 

Here's my outlook though. The thing with lower end stuff is it pushes software developers to come up with clever ideas. A lot of techniques you see used in games today were developed originally to get around the limitations of consoles at the time. The most famous example I like to use is deferred lighting originated on the Xbox. I don't think it came to PCs until at least the next generation of game engines after that.

 

To me targeting the highest end represents brute force, inelegance, etc. They just thought "well it has a lot of power so lets use whatever works" rather than "we need to squeeze out an extra milisecond out of this algorithm (which in video games, that's a lot of time)"

It's like any hobby though. You actually look how much stuff is. Drone racing is in the $1000s RC cars you can easily spend over $3K in one car over the years. Wood working tools are really exspensive and so on. There is a hobby for everything and everything has a price when you want premium 

[AshleyAshes]

1 minute ago, SamStrecker said:

It's like any hobby though. You actually look how much stuff is. Drone racing is in the $1000s RC cars you can easily spend over $3K in one car over the years. Wood working tools are really exspensive and so on. There is a hobby for everything and everything has a price when you want premium 

You still seem to be working under the belief that 'premium' is 'the only way to do it right' and I don't see why.

[Mira Yurizaki]

Just now, SamStrecker said:

It's like any hobby though. You actually look how much stuff is. Drone racing is in the $1000s RC cars you can easily spend over $3K in one car over the years. Wood working tools are really exspensive and so on. There is a hobby for everything and everything has a price when you want premium 

At least with what you suggested, spending more money can translate to an appreciable difference in quality.

 

When you spend $10,000 for a gaming rig, you're simply doing it for bragging rights with little if any practicality because the returns start diminishing really hard after say the i7-6800K and two-way SLI.

[SLAYR]

44 minutes ago, SamStrecker said:

Sounds like someone who can't afford things would say. High end rigs are the best. You get the best color schemes, looks, and coolers. Might be AIO, custom or air. Usually companies slap the best on their flagship cards. I would consider i7 6700K and a 1070 boring but a quad Titan XP and 6950X is amazing

Also higher end components drop value so fast, if you look at the original titan with a $1000USD price, it has dropped to $200 or less in some cases about 20% original value, where as cards like the gtx 650 has only dropped to $40 from $110 about 36% original value.

[Space Reptile]

diminished returns work both ways , if you go too cheap (gt 210) or too expensive (Titan XP )

i mean a 10k$ rig is something someone would not upgrade every year or two like you may have to w/ sweetspot components ,

but knowing the scene as soon as its not NEW AND SHINY it will be upgraded ( i see plenty of threads here wich are like "shud i upgrade to a 68/69k , i have a 67k" ) 

[AshleyAshes]

1 minute ago, Space Reptile said:

but knowing the scene as soon as its not NEW AND SHINY it well be upgraded ( i see plenty of threads here wich are like "shud i upgrade to a 68/69k , i have a 67k" ) 

OMG, those people... It drives me nuts.  'Intel just released a new CPU that's 8% faster per clock.  Should I pour gasoline on my old PC, burn it and buy the new one!?  That could get me 5 more frames in my favorite game.  I think I might die without those extra frames!'

[SLAYR]

4 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said:

OMG, those people... It drives me nuts.  'Intel just released a new CPU that's 8% faster per clock.  Should I pour gasoline on my old PC, burn it and buy the new one!?  That could get me 5 more frames in my favorite game.  I think I might die without those extra frames!'

Some people just really like burning money, and think that their computer will be obsolete as soon as the next line of cpus comes out, really even people who have sandybridge/ivybridge cpus are fine unless something breaks old motherboards can be expensive, especially overclocking ones.

[AshleyAshes]

1 minute ago, SLAYR said:

Some people just really like burning money, and think that their computer will be obsolete as soon as the next line of cpus comes out, really even people who have sandybridge/ivybridge cpus are fine unless something breaks old motherboards can be expensive, especially overclocking ones.

"Oh no!  You can't use that i5 2500k!  You're 1080 will BOTTLE NECK.  BOTTLE NECKING IS PC CANCER!  You have to spend $500 on a new CPU and motherboard, THEN your GPU will run 15% faster than it would on that 2500k!"

 

Ugh...