incoherence.net

Upgrading a computer is like watching a prime time sitcom – you start of innocent enough, watch a few episodes, then a few more, until you’re downing entire seasons’ worth of content and holding week-long couch marathons. Then comes the period where you form a cone of quotes from the show and annoy everybody around you, hence prompting you to drop the obsession and pick up something else less addictive, like a…crime drama, say. Rinse and repeat.

Recently, price drops in computing parts of goodness have prompted me to look at means to turbocharge my machine and give it a swift, speedy kick in its metaphorical pants. As I said, chasing performance in personal computing can be an expensive, time-consuming, and if nothing else futile effort, but it’s damned fun while you’re doing deed.

Since the last time I did this someone actually found the price listings helpful, here’s how much things cost me this time around. Of course, I’m also making some of my money back via selling my older parts, and admittedly when I first built my computer I knew that I was buying a lot of cheaper and older parts since I spent most of my money on the monitor and other external accessories.

The diversity in naming codes for different computer parts is amazing.

I’ve also found out the hard way that modularity is situational at best. That is, there are two rules to play by – if you’re producing a part that is easily replacable and you have a bunch of other companies doing the same thing, then there’s an established standard and you have to follow it to do business. On the other hand, if you’re one of two or three companies that control that sector of computing, you create new standards biennially (i.e., once every 2 years) or you outdo yourself so quickly that you devalue the old parts into dirt.

So, anybody interested in used computer parts whose value:dirt ratio is moderately humble?