I can feel it. I know you can feel it, too. People screaming, economy drops, drastic measures taken, the weak and the olds were left behind, new weapons being built.
I’m talking about the high-end computer hardware battle. Nvidia releases a new video card, AMD answers by dropping their lineup prices, which was answered by Nvidia by releasing another product quietly, not mentioning changing their product names to be more… appropriate. And don’t make me start telling stories about the CPU battle. It’s even scarier.
Now, if you are still sane, you’re not gonna be thrilled to know that the newest-sexiest and guaranteed-to overclock-nicely hardware just come out this morning and put an order on it.
Normal people should be excited for at most a whole minute, and then regain their sanity. Because after that minute passed, they realize that the buzz is just as cheap as a nice used car.
Now, how much computer power (measured in computron, of course…) will a normal, sane user need?
For grandma’s everyday computing, a good old Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon XP is still sufficient to run email manager, word processor, and antivirus software. Give it at least 512MB of RAM (double that if she’s using windows vista) and she’ll love you more, at least. This will work for your mothers and aunts too..
For white-collar office workers, put together a rig with a nice CPU and case, cut corners for everything else, especially the RAM. You’ll have a good chance of being promoted into purchasing manager by doing this.
In the next category lies the holy, untouchable CAD workers. Nothing but the very best will do for them. Actually, if they calculate the price for the PC they’re using and found the result to be less than five digits, they’ll hate you and your descendants.
Young overclockers are the ones you will find in this category. Give ‘em newest-but-slowest processors, and a pair of RAM guaranteed not to burn, ever. For graphics deparment, they usually, but not always, want dual/triple/quad graphics card. And, of course, Terabytes of free harddrive space.
What about me, you ask? Well, overclockable low-end processor will suit me, ample amount of RAM, nice midrange graphics card, throw in a few hundred gigabytes of harddrive space and I’ll be happy.
Yes, I realize there are still many categories I haven’t mentioned, post them in the comments below if you will.
