An Expensive Hobby

I’m a greedy man I think as I’m constantly looking at the price of components on ebuyer.com with an eye on improving my PC. I’ve not got much spare cash right now, and with Christmas approaching I’ll need to set some aside for presents, but I’m still plotting and planning and dreaming of a massive upgrade. I know it’s only been about a year since the last time I carried out some upgrades, but I’m planning a more comprehensive overhall this time. The old dual core AMD Athlon that I’ve got is starting to act quite tired, and windows XP is slowly choking to death under the bloat of installed crap that I’ve never got round to removing.

I’ve even gone as far as going through all the review websites and checking out what would give me the best bang for my buck.  Tom’s Hardware and Tech Radar have been particularly helpful as ever. I’ve not gone overboard and went for the best of stuff, but I have tried to pick things that will last quite a long time and dramatically improve the current performance of my machine.

So far my plans are shaping up like this:

Intel Core i7 920 D0 – £214.87

ASUS P6T Deluxe V2 iX58 – £202.30

Antec 902 Nine Hundred Two Black ATX Case – £86.99

Samsung SpinPoint F1 HD103UJ 1TB Hard Drive x2 – £116.22

Corsair 6GB (3x2GB) DDR3 1600MHz XMS3 – £133.21

Grand Total: – £753.59

Unfortunately that’s far to steep for my current financial situation. In fact for that price I could more or less get the MacBook that I’m always humming and hawing about, or I could even buy a complete computer from Mesh or some of the other specialist gaming PC retailers. Advantages being that I would get the whole package with a warranty, and various other peripherals included in the price.

I’ve already got a copy of windows 7 professional that I bought, so it would be a simple matter to wipe all the preinstalled crap off a shop bought machine and set it up however the hell I like.

Teh DEADLY UPGRADEZ!

My PC is starting to look a little bit tired recently, and with Fallout 3, Grand Theft Auto 4 and a host of other highly anticipated games due out soon I feel the time has come for the fabled upgrades.

Now upgrading a computer can be a fairly painful process if you start choosing parts at random. Especially given that component manufacturers seem hell bent on making their naming conventions as confusing as possible for the average consumer. More often than not finding the best parts you can afford is only half the battle. Unlike buying a complete computer off the shelf building one yourself is a bit like mixing random chemicals in a mad scientist’s lab while hoping that the resultant potion won’t blow you to bits or mutate you into a sentient cockroach. You’re knee deep in the jungle of no warranty, no returns and so far off the map that you’re likely to be eaten by techno-pygmy cannibals.

In short it’s exciting and I’d recommend it to anyone.

Now to the nitty-gritty: for reference I’ve currently got an AMD Athalon 64 X2 4200 and the Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard at the heart of the machine. I reckon for the moment they will be sufficient for now as the graphics card and memory seem to be the major bottlenecks.

I’ve done a lot of research on the graphics card side of things, and the two main players NVIDIA and ATI both seem to be about neck and neck in the technology stakes. NVIDIA seems to have a small lead with their new flagship cards in the 200 series, but ATI tends to produce cheaper cards in general.

After a lot of research I’ve plumbed for an NVIDIA GTX260 OC2 from BGF Tech. BFG are quite highly regarded in hardware circles for the quality of their products and their excellent customer service so I expect great things. The card itself has quite a few good reviews online and the customer ratings on Ebuyer aren’t bad either. The price is maybe a bit steep at £236.31 but hopefully I won’t have to upgrade it for a while.

The trouble with buying a king sized graphics card like the GTX260 is that it needs power, a lot of power. In fact it needs a pair of 6 pin molex power connectors with a combined 12V current rating of 38A or more. That’s serious power and far beyond the capabilities of the cheap ass power supply I got as part of my last upgrade in the summer of 2006.

A quick scan of the Ebuyer website and forums doesn’t yield very much advice about buying power supplies. In fact much of the nomenclature and information seems even more confusing than the stuff that surrounds graphics cards and processors. Two things appear to be clear though: firstly you should always buy a good brand of power supply as cheap generic ones tend to be rubbish and secondly the voltage and amperage on the individual rails is king. Overall wattage is important, but if you can’t deliver the current and voltage down the cables your kilowatt mega-power 3000 isn’t worth the money you’ve spent on it.

With those two considerations in mind I trawled around for a couple of hours trying to see the best power supply I could get for my money. I finally settled on a Coolermaster eXtreme Power 650W which has a few good reviews for low noise and a good solid flow of power. Crucially it also has the right combination of power connectors to feed the hungry beast that is my new graphics card and all for just £45.

Last but not least I’ve ordered a couple of extra gigs of Crucial DDR RAM to bring the machine up to the motherboard’s operating limit of 3GB. Hopefully that should speed up the computer in general until I can afford to upgrade the motherboard and processor.

The parts are all ordered now for a grand total of just over three hundred bucks. I can’t wait to get them all together and see the results.

The Deadly iTendering Process

In spite of, or maybe because of, my wage slave status I’ve been giving a lot of consideration to buying a Macbook on hire purchase. It would be pure indulgence of course as I don’t need it. It doesn’t really do anything that a windows laptop couldn’t and it’s expensive for the specifications, but damn it, it’s pretty as hell.

The only reason I’m giving any serious credence to the idea is because I’ve discovered that employees of The Work get a variable discount at the online apple store. According to the discount page I can get the smallest of new aluminium body Macbooks for £872.85 instead of the normal £929.00 retail price. That’s about 8% of a saving over the retail. At the other end of the spectrum I could choose to get the highest rated of the Macbook Pro’s for £1754.90 instead of the retail price of £1908.00 which again is an 8% saving on the price. It’s not much of a discount to be fair, but any discount at all is better than a kick in the balls from Gavin Hastings.

Now the Apple Store has a wee info box that claims I could own the Aluminium MacBook I mentioned for as little as £23.84 a month over 36 months. That means in the long run it would cost about £858.24 for a machine that I could get for £872.85 with the corporate discount rate. This seems a fairly questionable to me though.

Why would Apple make a loss on the hire purchase option when everyone else in the world is milking it for all it’s worth?  As a cynical Ayrshireman I went looking for the small print and found the fatal line hidden halfway down the page: “Typical APR of 15.7%”. In my previous experience only Bill Gates himself would be given the typical APR on a loan, but I’ll use it in my calculations as I’ve no idea what rate they would offer me.

First of all I’d like to say that APR is a slippery customer. It’s not as simple as adding 3×15.7% onto the amount of the loan and having a cup of tea. Thankfully the good people at Microsoft included a formula in Excel that calculates the final payable amount for you.

If you’re interested the formula in question is called PMT() and you use it with the following arguments:

=PMT(Monthly_Interest_Rate, Number_Of_Monthly_Repayments, Loan_Amount, End_Value, Payments_Due)

I’ve paraphrased the argument names a bit to make them clearer. To make use of the formula you need to divide the APR by 12 to get the monthly rate and plug this into Monthly_Interest_Rate. The rest are fairly straightforward: Number_Of_Monthly_Repayments is the number of months that the loan will run for. Loan_Amount is the original amount you’re borrowing; End_Value should normally be zero as it’s the goal you’re shooting for. Payments due is optional and sets if the payments are due at the beginning or end of the loan period. This formula will give you the approximate monthly repayments that you’ll really be paying. These figures might vary a bit from what the lender decides due to other factors, but it serves as a good guide as to what the repayments and total are going to be.

What about the results though? Well according to my excel based calculations my actual monthly repayments, assuming an APR of 15.7% and a loan amount of only £872.85, would be £30.56 which is £6.72 a month more than the Apple Store info box claims. A quick multiplication by 36 for the number of months of the loan gives a final total cost of £1,100.08 for my brand spanking new Macbook. That’s a difference of £227.23 or roughly 20.5% extra on top of the original cost.

I still want it though. These figures change nothing. This is just the infamous TENDERING PROCESS in action.

EDIT – If you’re curious the top of the line Macbook Pro at £1754.90 would have repayments of £61.44 with a total £2,211.75 payable by the end of the 36 months.

Teh DEADLY UPGRADEZ!

My PC is starting to look a little bit tired recently, and with Fallout 3, Grand Theft Auto 4 and a host of other highly anticipated games due out soon I feel the time has come for the fabled upgrades.

Now upgrading a computer can be a fairly painful process if you start choosing parts at random. Especially given that component manufacturers seem hell bent on making their naming conventions as confusing as possible for the average consumer. More often than not finding the best parts you can afford is only half the battle. Unlike buying a complete computer off the shelf building one yourself is a bit like mixing random chemicals in a mad scientist’s lab while hoping that the resultant potion won’t blow you to bits or mutate you into a sentient cockroach. You’re knee deep in the jungle of no warranty, no returns and so far off the map that you’re likely to be eaten by techno-pygmy cannibals.

In short it’s exciting and I’d recommend it to anyone.

Now to the nitty-gritty: for reference I’ve currently got an AMD Athalon 64 X2 4200 and the Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard at the heart of the machine. I reckon for the moment they will be sufficient for now as the graphics card and memory seem to be the major bottlenecks.

I’ve done a lot of research on the graphics card side of things, and the two main players NVIDIA and ATI both seem to be about neck and neck in the technology stakes. NVIDIA seems to have a small lead with their new flagship cards in the 200 series, but ATI tends to produce cheaper cards in general.

After a lot of research I’ve plumbed for an NVIDIA GTX260 OC2 from BGF Tech. BFG are quite highly regarded in hardware circles for the quality of their products and their excellent customer service so I expect great things. The card itself has quite a few good reviews online and the customer ratings on Ebuyer aren’t bad either. The price is maybe a bit steep at £236.31 but hopefully I won’t have to upgrade it for a while.

The trouble with buying a king sized graphics card like the GTX260 is that it needs power, a lot of power. In fact it needs a pair of 6 pin molex power connectors with a combined 12V current rating of 38A or more. That’s serious power and far beyond the capabilities of the cheap ass power supply I got as part of my last upgrade in the summer of 2006.

A quick scan of the Ebuyer website and forums doesn’t yield very much advice about buying power supplies. In fact much of the nomenclature and information seems even more confusing than the stuff that surrounds graphics cards and processors. Two things appear to be clear though: firstly you should always buy a good brand of power supply as cheap generic ones tend to be rubbish and secondly the voltage and amperage on the individual rails is king. Overall wattage is important, but if you can’t deliver the current and voltage down the cables your kilowatt mega-power 3000 isn’t worth the money you’ve spent on it.

With those two considerations in mind I trawled around for a couple of hours trying to see the best power supply I could get for my money. I finally settled on a Coolermaster eXtreme Power 650W which has a few good reviews for low noise and a good solid flow of power. Crucially it also has the right combination of power connectors to feed the hungry beast that is my new graphics card and all for just £45.

Last but not least I’ve ordered a couple of extra gigs of Crucial DDR RAM to bring the machine up to the motherboard’s operating limit of 3GB. Hopefully that should speed up the computer in general until I can afford to upgrade the motherboard and processor.

The parts are all ordered now for a grand total of just over three hundred bucks. I can’t wait to get them all together and see the results.

The Infamous Tendering Process

I’ve always tried to be meticulous in my finances. I suppose some of it comes from many years as student when I had little or no spare money and had to scrape by eating plain bread and drinking Coca-Cola. I’ve never had any real regrets over my lack of disposable income, but I will admit to occasional pangs of jealousy when I saw flatmates and friends spending a fortune on minidisk players, computer parts and other unnecessary luxuries.  That’s life though, the grass always seems greener in someone else’s field, and if you spend it trying to keep up with the Jones you’ll never really get anywhere.

Over the years I’ve developed a very careful and considerate approach to buying things. The more expensive, or luxurious, the item the more careful and considerate I become when trying to decide to buy it or not. El Kat has humorously dubbed this the Infamous Tendering Process and has compared it to governments putting out contracts for construction work. It’s a fair comparison as both things take ages, involve a lot of unnecessary scrutiny and often end up coming in over budget in spite of the best efforts of the organisers to get the best value for money.

The Infamous Tendering Process is slightly different from the government contracting process though. The government generally already knows what it wants and it’s just looking for the right company to build it for the right price. I generally want something, and I know the price of it on a hundred different website, but I can’t be sure that I really want, need or deserve to get it. I also do a lot of deliberating about the possible after effects of getting the item in question. I worry about not having enough money left to pay the bills, feed myself or carry out the day to day stuff that I need to do to stay hale, hearty and sane.

I don’t see a great problem with my cautious approach, but as El Kat points out it can make a torturous drawn out process out of something that would be a simple impulse purchase for anyone else.