I would have totally gone FalconNW, but (now it’s my turn to show my bias), aren’t they friggin’ expensive? Admittedly, last time I looked was…ahem…in the 90’s. : /
That’s how it started, yes.
I think the term since then evolved though to encompass any Dell desktop bought on sale, and then upgraded to gaming machine specs with a PSU, graphics card, and more memory, and possibly another hard drive. Two of my last three machines were in fact Stusserbeasts, though I always lamented not having an official sticker to put on the front.
I’ve still seen mention of proprietary connections and motherboards basically mounted on non-standard spacing so basically it won’t fit in anything else and vice versa. Charging cables for laptops, front i/o connections and so on.
They seem to have moved slightly away from some of the truly shit things like ram soldered in, crap non-standard sized psu, but I certainly have dealt with them enough to not trust them as far as I could kick them.
They don’t solder in RAM. They don’t use substandard power suppplies.
It’s 2018 guys. Times have changed.
Woah. Now that one I hadn’t heard of before. That’s awful! By far, that’s the worst example I’ve yet heard of.
Honestly, in the last 10 years that I’ve been using Dell-based rigs, I haven’t encountered anything that couldn’t be easily upgraded. But I’ve been using exclusively desktop XPS and Alienware rigs, so I certainly can’t speak to anything other than those. I also have never needed to replace a motherboard, so I can’t speak to that either.
Were these examples recent? I’m just wondering if they’ve done anything egregious like that in recent years, because if they have, I’ve somehow managed to avoid it.
I only faintly recall that one and it might have been a laptop ages ago.
So hey, maybe they quit being assholes and are amazing, but I’m just saying I personally won’t bother to give them my business again.
Whatever year it is, they’ve wasted enough of my time that I took my money elsewhere and it isn’t going back in their direction. Especially when my oldest has a chromebook with a bum charger that they want something like $80 for a fucking power brick with a plug.
Many manufacturers are soldering in one slot of ram in their laptops. Never seen it happening on desktops.
Soldering RAM?! What the everloving fuck?
Yeah, I’ve been racking my brain, trying to figure out why they would do such a thing. What would be the motivation? To make double-damn sure it doesn’t fall out?
Or maybe because (and I hate to go here) if your ram dies, you’ve got to buy a new computer? Or get really good with a soldering iron (or however you’re supposed to remove the ram)?
Edit: I found this little discussion about it.
One thing is certain: If I’m ever going to look for a laptop, I’m gonna make damn sure about this aspect before buying one.
I remember having to buy individual DIMMs, or tubes of like eight or nine of them, and putting them on, individually, onto memory boards. Number of DIMMs depended on whether you had parity checking or not I think, something like that. All that for like another 128k or 256k or something.
They probably weren’t even DIMMs, but SIMMs at that point. I remember upgrading my 486 with 8 1MB SIMMs.
Yeah, might have been SIMMs. Can’t recall when DIMMs came in, guess I just spent a bit more time with them so the acronym sticks. I remember doing this memory thing in like 1984.
Of course, a few years later, things weren’t that much better. I remember my early Macintosh SE, the one with the ginormous 20MB HD I think. There was some sort of issue with the fan (I think it had like one fan), and Apple’s response was, I kid you not, to send owners a replacement squirrel-cage type fan with instructions on how to desolder the old one from the mainboard and solder this one in its place. Which I did (while in Germany, having had the part shipped to my APO address). Crack open the case with the funky tool, extract the mainboard, desolder, resolder. Voila. It actually freakin’ worked.
Imagine that today. “To fix your MacBook, follow these simple steps…”
FWIW, I heartily recommend ditching magnetic disk drive forever. It is begging to fail (like we are born to die). I can’t remember how many magnetic drives failed on me before the other parts of the system ever did. Yes SSD is a lot more expensive, and there is the issue of limited write cycle. But the speed! And if your SSD is big enough, the write cycle limit isn’t an issue.
My (edit: 1.5 years old) Seagate Barracuda 2TB magnetic disk drive failed on me this weekend, and it is a PITA to get it replaced. All the games are there, now I have to redownload them again. I never trusted it enough to put data on it anyway. And now I’ve replaced it with SSD, 1/4 of the magnetic HD size but triple the price (Samsung 970 Evo). Crucial SSDs are cheaper but I neeeed theeeee speeeed.
you can RAID drives for redundancy and performance. just an option.
I had a Crucial SSD drive die on me after a year or so, so they aren’t immune to failure.
I do agree though with what you said, I have had a lot of magnetic hard drives fail over the years - more than other components.
True, but increasingly, why? SSDs are getting cheaper all the time, and RAID seems like overkill in an era of cloud storage. But yeah, as all of us seem to have a mound of harddrives laying around (I sure do) it might make sense in certain applications, and it’d be dirt cheap.
Ohhh, so I found a bunch of potential leads via Yelp, and contacted the one with the best reviews today. They said they charge $75 an hour, and can totally put my PC together if I have the parts!
I’ve got some other leads to check on, but this is very promising!
Late to the thread, but here’s my 2 cents:
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future-proofing is a waste of money. Buying a $3K PC today, so that it will last you 5 years, isn’t a good deal or technically sound. Spend $1-$1.5K today. In 3 years, a $1.5K machine will beat your $3K machine in many uses.
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most gamers way, way overspec their machines, and often do it in lopsided ways. Too much ram, too many cores, too much video card for their intended resolution. Builds often look like Popeye—disproportionate in one aspect or the other, causing a bottleneck that wastes the area that you overspent on.
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Return on investment at the enthusiast end drops dramatically. That last 10% of increased performance literally doubles the price, which is the cause for #1. Mid-level is where it’s at.
Personally, I’m both a cheap-ass (I really, really like a good value) and OCD about comps. I’ve probably built over a dozen systems over the years for myself and friends. But for this last cycle, I simply couldn’t beat a pre-built from the Dell Outlet that I got over the last Black Friday:
Refurbed XPS 8920: i7-7700, Radeon RX 580 8GB, 24GB DDR4 RAM, 256GB NVMe SSD, 1TB 7200 HDD. $805 out the door.
Is it the shiniest? Hell no. But it’s run everything that I’ve thrown at it at 1440 with no issues and I couldn’t be happier with it. Whisper quiet, no crazy lights, and cheap. Leaves a lot of bank for a nice monitor and other stuff. I could drop the same amount of cash in 2-3 years and keep the gaming going better than dropping $3K today and trying to stretch it to 4-5 years.
A few years ago I bought a pre-built from a well-respected boutique shop because it was a good deal (the parts were within $100 of buying them myself). When it arrived, it wasn’t overclocked (as it was supposed to be), and one of the RAM wasn’t seated properly, so I ended up futzing around with it anyway.
Last time I decided to build my own, even though I am a complete and utter idiot. I’m OK wth technology, but just any crafty/physical stuff I am all thumbs and tend to make mistakes. Nevertheless, I found the case I wanted, looked up a couple of videos of folks doing builds in that case, and dove in. It’s been humming along fine for several years and I know much more about its innards than I would othewise, so upgrades are a piece of cake.
A case that makes cable management easy-peasy, such as the the Corsair Carbide Air Series, is perfect if you don’t have much experience building your own. The Carbide Air has two sides: One for the components, and one for all your cabling and PSU. It’s like having a junk drawer for your cables. Your case will look so clean you’ll be tempted to perform surgery in it.
Nothing wrong with big box, boutique builders, or having a local guy throw it together for you, but in my decades of PC ownership, those guys have fucked things up more than me, and I’m kind of an idiot.
This guy gets it. I remember that Black Friday deal. It was stellar.