This post is long, I was board, the spelling may be bad, and the punctuation scary. I did ramble on a bit, and so if you read it though to the end I will not refund you!!!!! **You have been warned**
I have been building computer systems for people for far too many years, and ran my own IT Company for about 5 years. Whenever someone comes to me and says “I want to buy a computer…” more times than not I have to stop them and then ask them two questions.
What do you want to do with the computer? And what is your budget?
When it comes down to it these are usually the only two things that the average Joe Bill Bob Spears really considers or cares about. Yes he will sometimes sits and listens to his friends and his mates at working going on about how much better this component or that component is compared to another. He may even read a review from a site I have never heard of. But once you get them to tell you what they need and not what they think they need, you can sell them anything and they will not care.
Most people don’t even know what brand of motherboard they have in there computer nor do they care about this. If the thing works and does exactly what they want it to do then they are happy. This, to me, is “subjective performance”. Good luck trying to come up with a way to measure this “subjective performance”.
I have never yet had anyone come back to me and tell me that the PC I sold them was crap or that the PC configuration I put together for them was not what they wanted. And I have sold many different PC configurations, from office PC’s and gaming system to servers.
To these people benchmarks are irrelevant as the system is doing exactly what they want it to do. Does this mean that they are irrelevant to me? Not at all, knowledge is power. The more information one can have/get about a given subject the better prepared you are to make decisions or comment about that subject.
For me benchmarks are a useful tool in determining how different hardware compares to each other. Benchmarks and performance testing done by reputable sources can be a very good indication of what to look for and what to look out for. They have there place and this is there home. Well one of them anyway.
When you login to these forums, and others that are similar, you enter a world where people do look at things like benchmarks and do take performance into account.
I think its great to have people come in here and say that they don’t care about these things, because to a large degree these things don’t matter at all as its all just data and info to those that want it or to those who use it for what ever reason.
If you don’t care about performance or benchmark results but want to make a point about something great, but don’t start threads like this and then complain or be surprised when people give you a shove or two when you start to ramble on about how useless these things are to you.
I think the AMD Quads do what they say they are going to do. That is multitasking, and they do that pretty well from all that I have read, just not as well as the INTEL quads. They are over priced, and right now AMD CPU’s do not perform well at all compared to INTEL CPU's.
So they are not for everyone. I will not be buying one for my gaming rig but I might consider one when I upgrade my file server. That is if AMD get there pricing right here in the UK.
You make a lot of valid points in this post and you are wrong I didn't find it boring at all and thanks for sharing your experience in the IT industry with us. You are definitely right when you say most people don't give a "rats toss bag," about what is in their system as long as it gets the job done.
The problem in the past has been that retailers squeeze the margins and saddle good working folk with the inappropriate hardware. One notable case in point comes to me in the form of the Cyrix CPU, where in the right office environment it was perfect, as a home pc it got into all sorts of trouble with its PR rating.
Most folks I know get their knickers in a knot when they want to upgrade their long serving faithful steed and are told they need a new machine. Here the head drops and the typical much loved by all retailers, Intel desktop gets its kick up the arse. Poor expansion opportunities and squeezed into budget cases has people shaking their heads at the whole industry and throwing up their hands and saying too hard, tooo bloody hard.
That's why I do love the AMD box. You can make it generous enough, add to it, tinker with it here add a video card there, give it a Via, SiS or Nv chipset and it comes back to life and performs like you'd expect it to. It's a very cheap up-gradable system. There is a Heinze variety of ways to get something extra out of it,
that's what makes them such a great enthusiast platform.
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