Hacker News Reader

I also recently upgraded the GPU in my ~4 year old PC, it cost me only the price of the new GPU and it's one of the only upgrades I've needed to make in that time.

It sounds like you're kind of an outlier in the build your own PC market -- it's pretty impressive you managed to find a motherboard supporting only the old DDR2 ram and having to replace the CPU fan. You also seem to have had to replace the motherboard to support your (likely PCI-E) GPU. Even before I built my first computer PCI-E was long supported by even cheap pre-built PCs.

There's a sweet spot around $600 for a PC, if you buy in this range you'll save money because you won't need to upgrade the majority of components in many years. I often recommend logicalincrements.com as it has PC prices per-component in tiers.

$150 is insanely cheap for a gaming PC and I don't think $150 has ever been "super expensive" by PC standards.

"There's a sweet spot around $600 for a PC, if you buy in this range you'll save money because you won't need to upgrade the majority of components in many years. I often recommend logicalincrements.com as it has PC prices per-component in tiers."

Exactly. It's the same mantra I've always used when doing computer builds. Incidentally, the last gaming rig [1] I built was about $600 with more power than necessary. :)

[1] http://elitegamingcomputers.com/gaming-computers/#2

I'm still not sure whether to upgrade or replace my 8 year old PC. Maybe I'll just hang on to it. It probably won't run the latest high-end games, but there's plenty of fairly recent stuff it still runs perfectly fine.

I dunno how are your sourcing those parts:

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/wwhHP6

But you seem to be picking very overpriced components. Also You are bit of outlier if your motherboard supports only DDR2 RAM. DDR3 has been in market for like 10 years and it is pretty cheap.

150$ for the parts he listed is not very expensive if he needs DDR2 which is unfortunate because it is too old and hard to get. But, i had a Q9550 QuadCore in 2009 that used DDR2 too which was quite common just 6 years ago.

I don't think price reduction was among the primary goals of this project.

Still, would you prefer to not have an option to disassemble the PC and replace it piecemeal? I know I wouldn't: more options is good. Also, in theory modularity creates possibilities for users to create uncommon configurations that would not otherwise be manufactured or cost impractically much (because of their rarity); it is not the case for Fairphone, but is the case for the PC and should be the case for Project Ara.

E.g. I have been modifying my PCs for low noise the way that should be outrageously expensive to buy serially. With Project Ara I should be able to assemble a high-end phone without the camera; a phone that goes all-out on battery life at all costs, etc. Fairphone has a noble goal to develop a smartphone with minimal harm to people and the planet, not necessarily a cheap or modular one: it is repairable (called modular here) only as a means to extend it useful life and thus reduce harm to the planet, even at the users' expense.

>overpriced memory (DDR2)

If you aren't buying stuff like this on eBay, you are doing it wrong. A 4GB stick is less than $10 including shipping (new, even) whereas the cheapest 4GB module on newegg is over $70.

I noticed recently while doing a price check on parts that NewEgg isn't the lowest on price anymore in a number of categories.

Why did you have to upgrade the entire pc to upgrade the graphics card? Pcie has been the only way to add graphics cards for a while now and newer versions of pcie are backwards compatible.

The upgrade argument of desktop in the 90s was already borderline as an argument. It was really worthy for people switching parts often. For long term it was clearly impossible to upgrade without changing 2/3 of it. And as you said, prices are only low for current mainstream parts. It may be an improvement to a previous era where nothing was swappable.

If you have, say, a 2011-vintage tower, you can do quite a bit to upgrade it: add more RAM (4GB to 12GB or 16GB); add an SSD to replace the HD; add or upgrade the graphics card; add ports via an expansion card etc.

Each upgrade can make a significant difference, and you don't necessarily waste anything, unless you change the graphics card. (If you go from 4GB to 16GB, you waste 2*2GB sodimms.)

Seems to me this was also true of earlier eras, too, only with smaller numbers.

SSD is an odd case, it is the simplest yet most impacting improvement to a computer.

Graphic card needs fast buses, if your mainboard gets behind you won't have access to the latest. I remember struggling with this long ago (pci -> agp; pcie 2x -> 4x).

It may be less an issue nowadays, so my point was off.

ps: It's funny you consider 2011 vintage, my most recent computer being from 2009 and I find it modern :)

It's funny you consider 2011 vintage, my most recent computer being from 2009 and I find it modern

Well, that's because I bought my i5-2500K desktop in 2011. I just chucked in a new hard drive and it's about to get another 8GB of RAM ;-)

My previous tower lasted 8 years. I'm not a gamer, but that one got a graphics card upgrade as well....

PS: I believe he used the noun usage of 'vintage', referring to a desktop manufactured in 2011.

I think the PCIe buses in standard PCs have been several generations ahead of what even high-end graphics cards need for a while now, actually.

It was a few years ago, it's possible I was into m-itx and these boards have limited pcie buses too slow for normal 3d graphics.

One advantage of a modular PC is that fixing a broken one can be much cheaper if you can pinpoint which component is broken.

It also helps a lot if the performance and requirements change at different speeds for different components. For a gaming PC you'll upgrade the GPU more often than you actually need to upgrade the CPU and the rest of the system. My 4 year old CPU is still fast enough (i2500k), but I upgraded the GPU in the meantime and added an SSD.

Reusing old parts can be pretty cheap, but probably doesn't make all that much sense if you need parts that aren't in common use anymore like the DDR2 in your case.

I'm in India and I purchased a ~50$ 350W power supply (Corsair is the brand) for my computer. (my total PC price is 150$ and it can play older 3D games at medium settings)

The PC analogy is a good one...and this is exactly why I moved to Macs after a decade of building and upgrading "Frankenstein's monster" PCs at great expense (time and money). With my first Mac I started to treat computers as a means to an end, as opposed to an end in itself. I wanted to start using computers to produce things - graphics, music, websites, apps. I got bored of endlessly tinkering with the hardware itself.

High-end Apple computers have always targeted the producer rather than the consumer. I look back to the days of upgrading graphics cards, heatsinks, power supplies etc, and wish that I'd spent that time honing other skills that would serve me better in later life.

Oh come on, as if you spend more than a few days time combined building PCs. It might be more convenient, but going the Apple route is certainly not cheaper. The PC i have now is really powerful, i built it about a year ago for $1200 and haven't touched the hardware since. Before that i had a PC from 2009 which was still plenty fast and all i upgraded was a SSD and new GPU after 2 years. My Macbook Air was much more expensive because Apple demands high extra cost for upgrading Ram and SSDs. When the PC breaks, i order a new part and have it running again in 2 days, a couple of hours if it's really crucial, while fixing a Mac yourself is nearly impossible these days. I love my Macbook and use it exclusively for work, but your arguments are weak and sound elitist.

I upgraded the SSD in my Macbook Pro Retina myself, using a relatively cheap replacement (not sourced from Apple). As for the RAM, at some future date when 16GB is inadequate, I suspect the graphics card, CPU and bus performance will also be inadequate, so it's better to upgrade the whole lot together and sell the Mac as an unadulterated unit. Mac resale value is far higher than PC kit. It's not a false economy to spend more to get a Mac, if you consider the TCO. Plus, if my Mac has problems, I just take it to one of the many nearby stores. Even out of warranty, they'll do a lot for free.

My arguments sound elitist? That doesn't bother me at all, I'm afraid.

Your original argument was about building "PCs at great expense (time and money)". I might agree with the time argument if you get some faulty hardware, but if anything its more down to software than hardware costing time. The TCO argument is fine if you have a perfectly working Mac after X years and sell it, but i usually pass them on to family members for little/no money so that does not apply to everybody. TCO depends on a lot of individual factors and luck (no repairs after warranty), price does not.