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>In short when all things are factored in, that $55 Athlon is the only thing that makes sense. It just that a lot of people have a >misshapen sense of proportion. No one is 100% sensible. They are entitled to their mistakes. I don't begrudge them. But they are >wrong.
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>No offense, but unless you're being sarcastic, this sounds very arrogant. Obviously, the 1.4GHz XP is the best CPU for you, but as >somebody else stated, not everybody rates CPUs the same way you do.
I accept your judgement that it sounds arrogant. When you state the truth baldly, it sounds arrogant. I tend to equivocate as a rule, and when I do, people miss the point. So this is the summary of what went before unequivocated.
I talk to a person who adores Feng Shui. Where this person picked it up, I don't know. I guess it beats dropping acid. Sometimes I point out an inconsistency or obvious falsehood in the Feng Shui rules, just to hint that I'm not buying it. I figure if this person is entitled to believe it, I am entitled to not believe it. If I were to say Feng Shui is utterly baseless and total nonsense as vocifereously and enthusiastically as this person expounds Feng Shui, I would sound arrogant and this person would get mad. Still, Feng Shui is complete, total, unmitigated garbarge.
It's not that Intel afficianados don't make good points, or even that high priced AMD CPUs don't deliver value in some (very atypical) cases. It's just that Intel afficianados sense of proportion is out of proportion. If they honestly evaluated the things they claim to value, they would buy the $55 Athlon. People have money to burn -$200 is nothing- and don't know where to burn it. They want shiney, flashy things. Because other people get excited about the latest flashy thing, they get excited too. From that, people who lurk here get a very false impression of the true value of computer hardware.
Let's make this semi-realistic. If you make money using your computer, and you can save time with a higher performance computer, you could get your computer for free, or even make money by buying the highest priced computer around. People who read the article know NVIDIA has a bank of computer racks, just a part of their total, containing nineteen million dollar plus computers each with 192 Gigabytes of memory. Elsewhere they have a rack containing 2800 CPUs. They probably spend more on electicity in a day than I have ever spent on my personal computer equipment. But NVIDIA comes out ahead because of their expenditure. Now we move to some corporation that has a large number of computers used by their office workers. They have computers of various ages and update them periodically. They could theoretically save money by buying new computers, even if they saved only a few minutes a day. Surely a 3GHz computer will outperform a 300MHz. How much should they spend on their new computers? One milllion dollars? Ten thousand? Three thousand? One thousand? So they buy the new computers, the employees are thrilled, and the company finds out productivity did not improve a bit, and in fact mysteriously seems to have dropped slightly. The old computers performed their tasks fast enough that they already kept up with the employees. The new OS interface is comfy and adorable, but it takes a few more steps to get where you need to go. If they got Intel CPUs in the new computers, they wasted their money.
Now we go to a home computer user. Unlike a typical home computer user, he likes to play FPS games, although is not a fanatic either, and he needs a high performance computer. All his games play fine, but his mobo is old. UT3 is coming out. He buys a $55 Athlon (+$15 HS), an Epox 8K3a to OC with, and his games still play fine, plus he can run benchmarks proving how wonderful the new computer is.
If we go to a typical home computer user, they can be happy with the computer that the Athlon/Epox combo replaced.
A glitch in the appeal of flashy items has put the chip industry into over-supply mode. America is not so socialist that we can't work out the misallocation of resources that the Federal Reserve induced, so things will straighten out and extravagance will rebound. I wouldn't count the day of the high-priced computer chip out. Someday Intel could again be selling consumer CPUs for over $1000, and AMD will follow behind them.