Hunting tech, not hunting tech

Feels a little weird at the moment.

Before laptop, I'd look up the laptop and tech prices if I got bored and wanted to look something up. Like if it were a slow news day and I'd run out of interesting things to read.

Now that I have the laptop, there's not really much point in me looking for tech. Indeed, when you buy anything computerish, it's a good idea to NOT look at anything tech for at least 6 months because the price has inevitably dropped and you'll make yourself depressed thinking that you could have saved a little cash if you'd waited.

The trick is to wait until there are discounts and buy at that point. Because if you buy discounted, it'll take even longer for the price to drop below what you paid.

With regards my laptop, it's still there at Scan for £680 which is £80 above what I paid. (Link to Scan). It's good when your discount is still a great discount even a couple of months after the event. The other item was a 250GB SSD from Crucial via Novatech, which is now £5 more than what I paid (Novatech link).

Haha, I'm used to things being the other way around there and things getting cheaper/better. The way it usually works is that you change the spec and end up spending about the same amount of money.

How about a homebrew machine though ? I used to amuse myself by making a daft wish list of the more expensive items to see what the possibilities were. Let's see how much a video editing and producing rig would cost :

Processor : AMD Threadripper 32 core - £1706. (Yep. This is a daft one)
Whereas the laptop with an i5-7300HQ chip renders in just under 3x the run time, this would probably render much faster than run time. That means less downtime between videos as well as higher quality going into the render.
Motherboard : Asrock Fatality X399 board for £445. The processor has to fit into a specific socket on the motherboard, which drives what you choose. And Asrock made the board that has glued Pumpkin together for 7 years now so I'd be happy to stick with them.
Memory : 32GB DDR4-28800 rated at 3.6GHz. This is driven by the processor, which demands at least 3GHz. Corsair memory is blacklisted so Kingston win this one. 32GB is £401.
Graphics : There are new 2080 cards out now and this is the daft machine so .... Gigabyte 2080Ti card for £1200.

Pretty much all of the above would have me going NOPENOPENOPENOPE in a machine I'd build for myself but ... this is a silly one. Indeed, the processor and graphics card on their own cost more than the £800 ish that I'd be looking to lay out.

You need stuff to make that hardware go, so here comes the :
Power supply : Corsair make good power supplies (although I've had one go pop on Pumpkin) and there's a 1000W fully modular Gold rated one for £170. This machine has a couple of graphics cards and I'll add a few hard discs soon, so you need a beefy power supply to keep those happy. If the machine is running close to maximum capacity, something will go Pop and might take another component with it.
This demands a shiny case with bags of room so : Riotoro full tower for £110.
You need to keep it cool (and apparently AMD Threadripper chips need a special cooler) : £75 for an air cooler. I'm not an advocate of water cooling in the domestic environment, although in other environments ? Ok.

Storage ?
Normal hard discs : let's have a pair of Western Digital (another one that's done well in Pumpkin) 8TB drives. These would be in a RAID pair with the data copied to both, so if one drive breaks ... you still have your data. An 8TB drive is £235 each, so add on £470.
SSD fast hard discs : another pair but this time from Crucial (more trust from Pumpkin). 2x 2TB drives for £331 each.
Oh and a bluray drive for £25.

Peripherals ? Gotta have those.
Keyboard - I love my mechanical keyboard. Indeed I feel a bit spoiled by it when I move back to conventional membrane keyboards. The current offering is a Steelseries M750 for £130. Mine is a Steelseries M800 which (through discounts and vouchers) cost me £30.
Mouse - I'm calling Logitech for this one with £35 for an M500.
Monitor - I like my AOC monitor so a couple of 24" ones please. Why not bigger ? Big is nice but if the monitor is too big, I can't see the sides when I'm in tunnel vision mode in a game. £232 each for a 25" G2590PX. Looks like my G2577 has been discontinued (it's a couple of years old).

One thing about monitors .... it might well be worth sticking to 1080p for the gaming monitor and then the working monitor can be any size. It's probably not worth creating videos above 1080p because who's going to watch them at that resolution ? And while going above 1080p is nice for image editing, I've found that it's actually a pain for gaming.

How much is all that ?

Processor and other engine bits : £3702
Box and cooling : £355
Storage : £1157
Peripherals : £629
Add on Windows for £80 and you have a grand total of £5,923. OUCH ! Enough even to inspire the old :

Haha, I think those kitties are from the days when I could spec up a £10,000+ PC fairly easily by going to SCSI devices which are now pretty much extinct.

A Pumpkin Mk2 would be significantly cheaper if I did one tomorrow.
Engine bits : AMD Ryzen 5 2600 (£157) in an Asus B450 AM4 motherboard (£98) which would be fed by 16GB of DDR4-2400 costing £127 and I'd reuse my relatively recent nVidia 1060 for £190.
Case, power and cooling : A nothing special case by BitFenix for £27, Corsair 650W Bronze power supply for £72 and a cpu cooler with 2x 120mm fans (big fans run slower and quieter, this is good) for £40.
Storage would be a 250GB SSD by Corsair in either SATA or M2 variety (depends on motherboard, M2 is preferred) for £55 and a single 3TB drive for £86
I'd be buying Windows again but I wouldn't refresh keyboard, monitor or mouse.

All together ? £932 to upgrade to a Pumpkin Mk2 (less £190 for the graphics card). I could also reuse my case and power supply and quite possibly the cooler too but ... Better to have shiny and new and undusted there.

I'm not going to upgrade Pumpkin this year. It's actually handling a heavily modded Skyrim very smoothly, with Skyrim being the game I'm playing at the moment that demands more performance.

You buy your PC stuff for a purpose at the end of the day. You could get the ultimate but ... if you're not going to use the performance then it's a waste of money that could have gone on lots of Lego. Lego is shiny. I'd rather have a mid range PC and a laptop (AND LEGO) than just an exotic PC that I wouldn't actually use to capacity.

Oh and look out for discounts too ... Buy when you want to, instead of when the shops want you to !

PS Missed off speakers, I'm using a set that cost me about £40 that are good. Also video editing software, when I make videos I use Magix Vegas which was acquired via a discount on the Steam store. I'd recommend it, although look at the newer versions that support the graphics card being able to boost the rendering performance.