The Ars Technica System Guide, Spring 2021: Gaming Edition
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
What the fuck is with this trend? I just want a goddamn black box to sit there quietly in the corner.
The aesthetic is absolutely gorgeous to a vast majority of people, myself included.
Especially the average person is going to look at the one with lights and the one without and assume the one with lights is automatically ‘better’.
It helps sales, it helps jack up prices.
You can see it in the dark clearly.
It looks more interesting on a live stream, something very important these days.
They’re programmable, and can be a fun way to express your personality.
These are just a few reasons this is a trend. :)
This sounds like perception bias to me. "The vast majority" of people are likely indifferent.
The amount that love it and the amount that hate it are probably about the same sizes.
Manufacturers just realized they can just target the part of the market that loves colorful stuff, charge more for it, and all groups, the lovers the haters and in between will buy it because it's the really the only stuff available. Which is the entire frustration the original post was complaining about: It's actually quite hard to find parts and cases (and even peripherals! It seems like most mechanical keyboards are light-up RGB keys nowadays) That don't have LEDs all over them.
Considering how ugly and tacky many cases are, there could be a market for case cases to cover them up, though of course, they'd have to be well-ventilated also.
I imagine the line of thought goes something like this:
most people don't buy desktops. if they buy a desktop at all (instead of a laptop), they are probably an enthusiast. if they're building a desktop from parts, they are definitely an enthusiast. if they have a window in their case, they want blingy hardware. if they don't care about bling, they won't have a case window to begin with. QED, put LEDs on every single retail part. outside of the HN crowd, I don't think they're actually wrong.
personally I don't hate the idea of RGB LED parts, but I do hate the fact that I have three different poorly written apps that control the colors of different hardware/peripherals for the same computer. and they never all manage to remember their state after a reboot.
I guess the demographic that buys PC parts these days is gamers that are into this stuff (as I was when I was 16, anyone remember cold cathodes?).
The vast majority of non-gamer computer buyers buy systems (or laptops) from Dell & co.
The whole aesthetic really does rest on a DIY aspect, off the shelf it's just obnoxious.
I just don't quite understand why it's a complaint, though. Is it difficult to buy a case without a window, and set LEDs to some kind of steady state dark color? Or simply replace the stock cooler with the one that looks the way you want? The whole point is being able to pick and choose so it fits what you want. Is it really hard to buy hardware that doesn't light up? I went to Newegg.com and plenty of the CPU coolers there have no lights. And you were able to disable the motherboard lights.
Here are lots of black boxes to pick from: https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?N=100007583%20600006506
It could have just been a dumb DC brush motor.
I'm sort of a "semi-lazy" builder who is happy to have motherboard RGB, Wraith coolers, and Sapphire lit up on my video card, because I like the lights, but wouldn't put in the effort to get them if they weren't included.
It seems to be getting harder to get motherboards without anything included, though I haven't specifically tried to shop for that. There still seems to be enough variety in cases, coolers, RAM and video cards to avoid RGB included in those components. Prior to Wraith coolers, there were always those builders who would get a crappy included cooler with their CPU and throw it in the trash to buy a proper quiet, efficient CPU cooler. Here I'm glad they are including a cooler that meets my needs, and I'm not having to shop around for a second purchase.
The GPU market is so crazy that my Nvidia card I bought 6 years ago is selling right now on Ebay for 1.5X what I paid for it.
What has the world come to?
For example, this prebuilt desktop from Maingear costs $2,500 [0]. The notable components are a AMD 5900X and Nvidia 3080. The 3080 alone has been sold for $2,000-2,500 (MSRP $699) on eBay. The 5900X has been sold for $600-700 (MSRP $549).
What you really need to consider, and where this Ars guide falls short, is on the vendor's support after you buy. Although I did not find an easy summary screen while scrubbing through the video and I am too lazy to compile one myself, the gulf between good and bad is is almost absurd. Definitely check out Linus Tech Tip's video where they buy a prebuilt system from a variety of vendors and put their support agents through a live fire support call for a routine shipping issue (memory falling out of the slot). Also quite telling is that this is the second time they have done it, and not many of the vendors have bothered to improve their process from the first go around.
If you aren't getting "adequate rear I/O" then go looking for a prebuilt Threadripper Pro system with $700 motherboard. There will be plenty of ports. They have to do something with 128 PCIe lanes.
One review claimed that the HP Omen has some kind of RAM serial number check in the BIOS: even if you buy the exact brand and model of HyperX Fury RAM, it will run slower, unless you buy it from HP. Generally, the HP Omen 25L and 30L were both knocked for loud/inadequate cooling. There are also complaints about difficulty canceling orders after discovering long shipping times that were not adequately disclosed at order time.
I didn't research the Alienware Aurora as much as the other two, but I did find some complaints about loud/inadequate cooling.
The Lenovo Legion Tower 7i looked really good. Decent design with adequate cooling. Shipping times are reasonable, because they only seem to list configurations that they actually have. If there is a complaint, it's that their configurations are fixed. You can't configure the RAM or storage. I didn't find as much detail on the 5i, but it seems reasonable within its limits (e.g., doesn't seem to be available with RTX 3080).
I also looked at prebuilts from CyberPower, iBuyPower, Corsair, Falcon Northwest, Origin, and others. I presume that their build quality is superior and/or less proprietary, which is generally reflected in their price.
I gave up on building my own this time around, and bought an MSI Trident X that happened to show up in stock one evening at Adorama. Its 1TB SSD came partitioned strangely (split into two big partitions with a recovery partition in between them), but MSI has a video on YouTube demonstrating how to fix that using Partition Assistant. I've only had it a few days, but I'm impressed that they squeezed a 10700K and RTX 3080 into a box significantly smaller and quieter than my home-built Ivy Bridge with a GTX 1060. I was able to add a 2TB M.2 with no trouble, and there's even room for 2.5" drive or two.
> How to Buy a Gaming PC in 2021 Best Gaming PCs, GPUs, and more
I clicked on this in my Feedly expecting a "how to build" guide, but it's a "how to buy" guide!
For the builders, motherboards seem to have returned to Earth, and some Ryzen 5xxx desktop CPUs are starting to show availability at MSRP. It's only GPUs that still sting (stink?), though depending on what you have now, you may be able to reuse it and wait for GPU markets to also come back to Earth.
Anecdote: Built my most recent PC two years ago with slightly aging stuff... X470 + Ryzen 2700X. Held off on video card and got that one year ago... RX 5600XT. Kind of itching to get an RX 6800 which is nearly double the performance of my card, but $290 is the most I've ever spent on a video card.
RAM and storage are both pretty good value purchases these days!
You can't build these systems because you almost can't find these GPU's.
Its all product related. Below the fold I start to find something else, like the 'how to find a covid vaccine appointment' but that is from Wired. Ars really looks like more advertising than content to me. Kinda feeling like I aged out of Ars, I'm not the target market.