Idea for Scrapyard Wars SE6

[baginitis]

Since Linus is officially out of ideas most of us expected SE5 to be nothing special in terms of the competition and rules a lot of viewers did not get disappointed. So feel free to post some ideas on how to make this show creative again and lets hope that SE6 will be at least inspired by some of the better ideas we might come up with.
 

Done so far:
>Build a budget PC
>Build a PC with DIY watercooling
>Build the best value PC
>Build and mod a PC
>Build a budget PC ver.2.0
 

I didn't look up any old threads on this topic, so I'm claiming this idea as my own, if it has been posted in some of the year old threads let me know.
 

>Scrapyard wars: free performance edition.
Overclocking is a HUGE part of PC hardware culture and yet it is never addressed in depth on LTT. My idea for the next scrapyard wars would not only be fixing this, but also changing the buying pattern, which has been price/performance oriented most of the time. This means that we could even end up with very old or exotic hardware if it overclocks better.
Since a lot of parts are overclockable (CPU, RAM, GPU, (+ Motherboard) which is basically the whole PC minus PSU and Hard drives) there won't be any "I'll just buy everything as cheap as I can with a well overclocking CPU and call it a day" if scored accordingly.
 

The idea is:
>points for "free" performance, meaning the Systems get benched 2 times.
>Bench 1: normal settings (no cheating!)
>Bench 2: everything overclocked as far as it can go
>Bench 2 gets compared to 1 and this will give the system a score. The bigger the difference, the better.

This is just the basic idea, you could still give points for the usual stuff (overall performance, looks, sound etc.) but I'd advise against it.
 

If this is a stupid idea, let me know. If you have a decent idea yourself with the only rule being "address the issues with Scrapyard Wars that you feel is making it stale and predictable" please let me know.

[That Mason Guy]

I like this idea yet I think they could also try, making there money to build there pc with. Rules are:

They can do anything to make money, each team gets 2 weeks, (I would preferably like to see something along the lines of like buying something for cheap and reselling it for more to make a profit), all equipment to use is free, but they have to pay for the expenses out of their budget (i.e Fuel if they were mowing lawns). In the 2 weeks they must also buy and build their pc's. (I know it wont happen but like and overnight one aswell where it doesn't just end in the afternoon so they have less barriers).

[DJones2894]

I would like to see them do the next one on completely neutral ground and maybe run a contest to pick a couple of fans to compete against.

[baginitis]

Good ideas. I'd like to see pretty much anything that brings LTT out of their comfort zone for the next season.

[baginitis]

45 minutes ago, edward30 said:

I like the build a budget PC and benchmark it formula. Why do they have to switch it up? They should have stayed with this formula throughout. Plenty of great shows do the same thing every season. They can differentiate seasons by who they are up against, and where they are doing it. Maybe more than 2 teams, maybe celebrity builders.

 

Heck, I think this show could be made into 24 or so minute episodes and put on Netflix in that format.

While this may be true you have to admit that being creative is still better then doing what worked once over and over again. A lot of people are complaining about the formula being the same and this will lead to a drop in viewers over a period of time. Also I think even the LTT team agrees with me on this point, or else they would not have tried to change the formula so drastically in the Season 2 and 4.

This is not some show where unexpected or very interesting/shocking stuff can happens even if you do the same thing all the time (like some wildlife show for example). There is no real "random element" in buying a PC on a budget, putting it together and comparing the PCs you've built. I guarantee, if they don't shake up the formula for the next 3 or more seasons you will be bored to death by the predictability.

 

Don't get me wrong, I love Scrapyard Wars as it is already. But why be satisfied with the minimum if all it takes is a good idea to get way more out of the show?

[LienusLateTips]

I wanna do eBay edition. You can only buy from eBay.

[sauce-c]

What about throwing in a power to performance metric? This makes it a possibility to make a possibly cheaper, lower total wattage PC in comparison to a super powerful PC, finding balance would be key.

[baginitis]

 

Great idea. This also gives me the idea of making a challenge around building a PC with as little active cooling as possible (points deducted per fan used). Looking at the power/performance metric in such a case would surely lead to the win, since low power parts can perform quite well these days (for example in laptops), while needing very little cooling.
Buying water cooling to cool all parts with one fan comes to mind but it is expensive and will lead to less money left for the PC components themselves. I can already imagine a build where you have one heatsink on the CPU and a CPU heatsink on the GPU (pic related), so a single fan can cool them both. I actually wonder if that would work.

Or you could in theory say "maximum wattage while running games/benchmarks is not allowed to exceed X Watts", which could be awesome since a lot of high end users are suffering from high electricity bills and the general power consumption of this planet seems to be too high.