Last night, a friend of mine asked me for help ordering a new computer, so I fired up Newegg.com and tossed some inexpensive components into my cart. The total (hardware only) came out to about $350. Not that long ago, that would be an insanely low price for a computer.
I decided to spec out two different machines today: one machine with fantastic specs that I would probably build for myself if I needed a new computer (and money wasn’t an issue), and one machine where I basically went crazy and built as awesome a machine as I could, no holds barred.
MACHINE #1 “Awesome”:
- Intel Core i7-920 Processor (Quad Core, 2.66GHz)
- 6GB of DDR3 RAM
- 300GB 10,000RPM Velociraptor Hard Drive (for system)
- 1TB 7200RPM Seagate Hard Drive (for storage)
- ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB Graphics Card
- LG Blu-Ray Burner
- OCZ 500W Modualr Power Supply
- Antec Nine Hundred Two case
MACHINE #2 “Ridiculous”:
- Intel Core i7-975 Extreme Processor (Quad Core, 3.33GHz)
- 12GB of DDR3 RAM
- Two 300GB 10,000RPM Velociraptor Hard Drives (RAIDed together for performance)
- 2TB 7200RPM WD Green Hard Drive (for storage)
- Two Nvidia GeForce GTX295 2GB graphics cards (in SLI)
- LG Blu-Ray Burner
- Kingwin 1000W Modular Power Supply
- Antec Nine Hundred Two case
Machine one is $1501, which was the price of a mid-range computer 10 years ago. I would say that almost everyone today would call this a very high-end computer.
Compare that to machine two, which comes in at a much heavier $3886 (It doesn’t help that the processor itself is $1000.) It would only offer incrementally better gaming performance, but the fact remains that it would be difficult to buy a personal computer with better performance than this beast. In 1981, this kind of money would have bought you an Apple II, a monitor, a couple floppy disk drives, and some software. Today, it buys you far more computer than you’ll know what to do with.
