Seems that the economic woes of the past few years have put a bit of a damper on the upgrade mill. Oh sure we got some new offerings from AMD/ATI and an ugly misstep by Nvidia. We've seen the emphasis change from raw CPU speed to ever increasing processor core count at more pedestrian clocks. There's been less of an emphasis on enthusiast class hardware and more on pushing the concept of a whole computer on a single chip. AMD leveled the first blow by beating Intel to the punch with an integrated memory controller. Intel followed suit and a few years later we have integrated video, control of the system bus as well as memory all on one die from both team green and team blue.
What that's left us with are offerings aimed at improving the market segment where casual web surfing, productivity applications and light gaming are the rule. After all if you don't have throngs of customers that can afford $1000 CPU's, $900 Video cards and $500 motherboards you'd better offer up something your customers can afford.
I've always been a value buyer. That doesn't mean I go for the cheapest hardware but I go for the most bang for the buck. When everyone else was going nuts over the then new Core I7 X58 plaftorms it seemed that the Core- I7 920 processor was the darling of the budget enthusiast crowd. I looked at the available offerings at the time and between the 920, 940 and 960 I chose the 940.
Yes it was twice as expensive as the 920 but for me it was worth it. It had more overclocking headroom with a higher base speed and it ran cooler than the 920's. It also consumed less power and did everything I wanted it to do with a lot less fuss. If you remember back that far there were whole batches of problematic 920's. Luckily, I managed to avoid such issues.
I remember that when I built a system based on a P55 Chipset Core I7 860 I specifically chose that processor instead of the next lowest Core I5-750 because I wanted hyperthreading capability. It cost twice as much but I appreciated it when I started working with VMWARE and played a few games on it.
Note in the previous two stories I didn't necessarily equate "value" with "cheap" Also note that the top offering in both platforms was never a consideration. The price differential between middle and top end was nothing more than marketing fabrication. All that extra cash got you access to features important to only the most diehard of overclocking fiends with liquid nitrogen pulsing through their veins.
Now it seems the enthusiast class is making a comeback with a few twists. Intel and AMD have new CPU families with chipsets ready to take advantage of them. The latest mainstream rage is USB 3.0 which finally offers transfer speeds on par with ESATA which itself has had a recent upgrade to 6GB/s speeds with SATA 3 (or 6 as it's sometimes called) This could effectively make hooking up external storage as fast with USB 3.0 as ESATA (5GB/s USB 3.0 6GB/s ESATA (SATA 6)).
Of course faster external devices are all well and good but I don't see them as enthusiast features unless you like to spend your days measuring disk transfer speeds with Sisoft Sandra. No, Fast hard drives are quickly giving way to SSD's as the performance storage medium of choice for the enthusiast crowd. SSD's are now akin to your carry on baggage where you keep all the stuff you want fast access to with traditional spinning platter drives relegated to the stuff that ends up in the luggage compartment.
Still that's not quite sexy enough for enthusiasts. Faster storage speeds are almost a given these days and any SSD can improve the performance of even the most mainstream PC. Once the price per Gigabyte barrier is broken making SSD's price competitive with standard HDD's of the same size it won't be long before SSD's will be the new storage norm. At that point only the most desperate of technology editors will be touting the event. The rest of the world will already be jaded enough to express little more than a collective yawn.
No, the latest excitement is swirling around PCI-E 3.0. In short PCI-E 3.0 is the newest standard for performance on the PCI Express interface offering twice the data rate (per lane and direction) and bandwidth of PCI-E 2.0. (Data Rate PCI-E 2.0/3.0 = 1000MB/s to 500MB/s Bandwidth 32GB/s to 16GB/s) The base clocks are 8Ghz vs 5Ghz for PCI-E 2.0 which translate to the same numbers just expressed as GT/s whatever that means.
All those numbers look very impressive on face value. Twice as much of anything is usually a good thing as performance goes at least as far as the marketing slides go.
The problem shows up when deciding on building a new system for your ultimate gaming rig. Surely the price premium for the latest chipset and support for the latest standards will bring the most bang for the buck right? Maybe not. Let's look at USB 3.0 for example. There's still a price premium for devices that support this standard and availability still isn't ubiquitous for them. PCI-E 3.0 currently has no devices available that could take advantage of the interface.
"So what!", you say, "the market will catch up and I'll be future proofed." Well, the sad fact is that unless your monitor is the size of bedroom wall with 20000 pixels per inch you'll never see any benefit from all that bandwidth. HardOCP did an article about a year back that bore this out when they were investigating the performance hit of two high end video cards running in SLI in X8/X8 mode. What they found was there was virtually no difference until you started hitting multi-monitor resolutions around 5760x1200 and then the effect was negligible. Even in PCI-E 2.1 you're going to be hard pressed to saturate that data channel.
You could wait a few years for the market to catch up and validate your "future-proof" argument but by then your hardware would be very much behind the curve. It's likely your system would be too obsolete to take advantage of any gains and likely ready for another round of upgrades.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for pushing the technology envelope. I just tend to skip the first generation of any new technology until the rest of the supporting components can catch up. I like automotive analogies so I'll use one here.
Anyone who's attended a custom car show has undoubtedly seen a few hot rods with big scoops atop huge carburetors sticking through the hood. They look very impressive and to the less informed gear head they may think, "Hey! I'll go get a bigger carb for my car and I'll go faster!'
What they end up with is a car more sluggish than before with horrible mileage because the engine wasn't designed to use the extra air and fuel. A Bigger anything is only better when the whole system can take advantage of the upgrade.
In short, I see nothing in the current enthusiast marketplace that's going to make my Portal 2 experience any better.
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