[Popple]

http://www.zdnet.com/fixing-the-pc-market-in-the-post-pc-era-build-better-pcs-7000026637/
Quote:

It's true that losers outnumbered winners in PC sales figures last year, but the winners; Lenovo, HP, and Dell pulled away from the pack in a big way.

I'm wondering if this has to do with lowering their profit margins with massive discounts.

There are articles on the net talking about the end of the custom building market, one of the reasons was economical factors. It seems like every new release from both Intel and AMD these years bumps up the respective price brackets by a not insubstantial amount. A lot of AMD cpus have surprised users here with their asking prices, and that is for a company who has the underhand. Memory prices are exceedingly bad as well, but that doesn't seem to impact the price/performance bargain of new tablets. There was also the industry-wide mechanical HDD price fixing two years ago.

I was looking into building an A8 7600 mini-itx system, but the price of 2133mhz ram today has prohibited that from happening. I have some spare 1600mhz ram lying around, but that wouldn't cut it for APUs.

Do note that these factors are separate from virtual currency mining.

Discuss

 

[linkin93]

Glad I bought 16GB of 2400MHz stuff when I did...

 

[MapRef41N93W]

Quote:

Originally Posted by linkin93

Glad I bought 16GB of 2400MHz stuff when I did...

Same here

 

[CalypsoRaz]

Quote:

Originally Posted by linkin93

Glad I bought 16GB of 2400MHz stuff when I did...

I recently bought 16GB of 2133... ouch

 

[996gt2]

Really glad I stocked up with 24GB of the Samsung 30nm "magic" RAM when about a year ago when it was still reasonably priced...

 

[Clocknut]

start putting money on artificial Intelligent assistant that takes up lots of CPU processing and produce smart useful/make sense assistant.

my desktop STILL isnt smart.

 

[Booty Warrior]

Quote:

Originally Posted by linkin93

Glad I bought 16GB of 2400MHz stuff when I did...

Yessir!

 

[Legonut]

Bought my samsung ram at $76 for 16gb and sold them for $110 a little while ago.

I'd hate to see custom pcs go away but I guess we could always hack and oc oem workstations.

 

[IMKR]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Popple

http://www.zdnet.com/fixing-the-pc-market-in-the-post-pc-era-build-better-pcs-7000026637/

I was looking into building an A8 7600 mini-itx system, but the price of 2133mhz ram today has prohibited that from happening. I have some spare 1600mhz ram lying around, but that wouldn't cut it for APUs.

Discuss

can u explain why?
i was told / researched that ram speed doesnt matter much.

and 1600mhz vs higher values doesnt change performance much.

 

[Booty Warrior]

Quote:

Originally Posted by IMKR

can u explain why?
i was told / researched that ram speed doesnt matter much.

and 1600mhz vs higher values doesnt change performance much.

It doesn't matter much when you have a dedicated GPU. But in an APU build, your RAM acts as system and graphic memory. Compare the raw bandwidth of even the highest clocked DDR3 with the GDDR5 we have on modern video cards and you'll understand why faster memory is a must for APUs.

 

[IMKR]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Booty Warrior

It doesn't matter much when you have a dedicated GPU. But in an APU build, your RAM acts as system and graphic memory. Compare the raw bandwidth of even the highest clocked DDR3 with the GDDR5 we have in modern GPUs and you'll understand why faster memory is a must for APUs.

okay, i kinda understand.

but doesnt the IGPU have enough vram? whats the vram on those?

on an off topic note, is this really the reason why there is a price spike in ram?
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/166775-ram-pricewatch-memory-spikes-in-wake-of-hynix-fire-but-for-how-long

 

[Doomtomb]

Well I can see why people are talking about DRAM prices instead of on point to the article. The author pretty much dances around a couple points and never "closes the deal." All he says is "hey build a better PC and we'll buy it." which I'm not sure how he can conclude that for every other consumer. Here's another point, he says "most businesses expect PCs to last three years." If you'd ask my place of work that question, it's easily 5 or more years. The age of "good enough" computing has taken root.

The only PC people are dropping money on are Macs. And that's partly due to the luke warm reception of Windows 8.

.....

Ya RAM is pricier because the factory space is all making NAND and LSI. It's not that expensive though.

 

[Vowels]

Quote:

Originally Posted by IMKR

can u explain why?
i was told / researched that ram speed doesnt matter much.

and 1600mhz vs higher values doesnt change performance much.

The GPU on the APU relies on your system memory. When it comes to GPUs, you want lots of bandwidth (frequency * bus width) and latencies are not as important. Dedicated GPU VRAM can run upwards of 6GHz while your system memory runs at a comparatively slow 1600MHz. Therefore, to get the most out of the GPU on an APU, you want faster memory.

If you use a dedicated graphics card then yeah, RAM speeds don't make a big difference since your GPU has its own dedicated VRAM.

 

[IMKR]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Doomtomb

Ya RAM is pricier because the factory space is all making NAND and LSI. It's not that expensive though.

what are these?

 

[BizzareRide]

I disagree... Macs are declining as well, though not as fast. People are dropping money on tablets and I think its in manufacturer's best interest to build better tablets and less PCs.

 

[Doomtomb]

Quote:

Originally Posted by IMKR

Quote:

Originally Posted by Doomtomb

Ya RAM is pricier because the factory space is all making NAND and LSI. It's not that expensive though.

what are these?

Flash memory and Microprocessors

 

[Carniflex]

The article is kinda lacking in content so there does not seem to be much to discuss in there. In a nutshell the point made is that "tablets are the new disposable PC's which are good enough but you cant really work on them in effective manner". Author seems to be on opinion that DELL, HP and others have somehow started producing better PC's - Take for example DELL Alienware. There are two models intended for PC games. Starting prices are 700$ and 1500$ - in the front page you see that these have 270X and 290X GFX cards in them, that's good for gaming, right? Then you open up the spec sheet, for example the 700$ model and what do you see - a nVidia 645 in a 700$ gaming computer? Really? You can scrape together a custom build for ~500 EUR which has nVidia 760 in it! You do not get into 270X before you hit 1200$ mark with that cheaper alienware and at 1200$ gaming computer you can do already better than that.

So I have to disagree also with the authors opinion that the large OEM's have somehow started doing better PC's. You can see the same trend with their other offerings as well - some bottleneck components here and there, for example bold claim of "4 GB graphics card" in some "gaming" PC to only find some low end thing in there with 4 GB of DDR3 memory, etc. Sure, their highest end offerings are pretty decent and if you customize the setup and know what you are after you can usually put together pretty ok set but you will end up paying through your nose for that if you are going for major OEM. And they will probably still sell you the crappiest possible PSU, for example.

 

[hollowtek]

Too much prices fixing in their industry has killed it. Imagine if manufacturers, Microsoft, and rottenegg stop the price gouging and wholefully accept less profit margins. This would usher in an revolution for pc gaming. Windows license are stupid expensive for systems builders. If Linux / steambox ever takes off I surely hope it makes Windows irrelevant as a gaming platform. Hell, at that point there'd almost be no incentives to stick with Ms for the average pc gamer or mainstream pc user (if Linux were to be stupid proof)

 

[Xinoxide]

I think the current drop in nand prices is worth a rise in dram cost. I just got a $225 480GB SSD of relatively decent performance. I wouldnt mind spending a little more on RAM as I personally feel any dissapointment has been negated.

 

[Tobiman]

Price of games is also key. I can't for the life of me figure out why I should pay $60 or probably around $90, with today's trends, for a PC game, if I can't resell it when I'm done playing or if I don't like it? Another reason why we should go back to consoles? It's a problem that's growing worse everyday and it's because we are putting so much money into our PCs for gaming. Developers see this trend and believe we have more money to spend than console gamers which isn't always entirely true. I mean, take a look. If you wanted to get a full and early experience out of Titanfall, BF4, COD Ghost and other recent games on PC, you are easily going to spend around $300+. That's insane.