Seraph wrote:Been there, done that. Let me tell you this: the exhilaration you get from owning a state of the art box for which you have paid a premium will have well and truly evaporated in a matter of a few months, or even weeks. I once spent $4000 on a 90MHz Pentium with 16 MB of RAM and a cavernous 540MB HDD, when everybody else thought 486s were the bees' knees. An acquaintance of mine said I was mad to buy something as overspecced as that. My excuse was that I got a good deal. My fire breathing monster was typically advertised for about $7500 at that time. Not very long after he told me that he just bought a Pentium II with 64MBs of RAM and a 940MB HDD. Nowadays I am happy with less cutting edge gear. My current computer replaces one that gave up the ghost after seven years. It's powered by some AMD CPU, the specs of which I can't even recall now, has 4 gigs of RAM, 1TB HDD and all the usual gubbins. Cost? $890. It does everything I want it to do quite nicely, thank you.
Yes, but I bet you don't want to do excessive crap like triple-monitor gaming on newest releases
Except for encoding/rendering programs, and games, there isn't all that much you can put top-end hardware to use for. It's just degrees of overkill. Why do I /NEED/ a top-end build? Why does someone else need a drag-racing modified muscle car? Why does someone else need a boat? People like nice crap even when it's not quite needed. In this case though (no pun Intelded) it's something I'll be using all the time and making good use out of, and as long as you pick your parts carefully, that degree of overkill you're buying can keep it suitably usable for another year or two for extremely demanding tasks. I can guarantee you that 7/10 people don't know enough about computers or use them enough to justify spending more than a grand tops on a machine, and another one out of ten knows computers but had medium needs. Then the other two are either professionals who need the power or obsessive fuckers who want the very best. So far in the year I've been piecing this together on and off, I think I've spent about $700, only maybe a third of which parts will end up being permanent. My mistakes? I settled for mid-range parts instead of going for what I should have. Also, I didn't know the market as well as I do now. I'm also far better at managing my money now. It's just a matter of making more of it, LOL.
As Oscar Wilde once said, "The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it."
)
