General: What Is a PC Enthusiast?

Bit-Tech has a rather thought-provoking article, on the misrepresentation of the PC enthusiast. Rather than being nostalgic look at the way things used to be, it really shows how badly wrong the "enthusiast" has been labeled, and does a pretty good job of summarising why I turn away 90% of hardware I'm asked to review. I am quite picky about what I look at. There is much more happening in the software world, which as usual is attempting to catch up with hardware's ridiculous life cycles.

In this respect, does it even matter what board you buy any more? Just recommend the (name of current favourite) chipset here and pick whatever fits your budget.

This has been the case for quite some time now. Pick a chipset, find the cheapest motherboard based on it you can. When the nForce 4 chipset came out, I loved the supercheap Foxconn motherboards, because they had the same performance as boards three times the price, and using the nForce overclocking utilities, you could even get a semi-decent overclock out of them.

The same has been the case for graphics cards for even longer. Being sent wave after wave of graphics card, all based on the same design, with a different sticker on the front, did little to enthuse me and made pulling even 700 words out of the air a difficult task.

Back in the day, the real enthusiasts were people that bought relatively inexpensive products and made them into expensive ones. It was about extracting the maximum value and that doesn't correlate to these companies’ bottom lines.

Another point I entirely agree on. Being an enthusiast was about seeing value and potential in something that didn't know it had it. Hearing a company say "this is targeted at the enthusiast" was like being punched in the face.

Companies seem to think an enthusiast is someone that wants to spend £500 on a graphics card, or £250 on a motherboard will all the bells and whistles. I have a word for those people, and it's not enthusiast...

I agree. It's hard to get exactly what you want/need without any surplus extras. That makes lots of things unnecessarily expensive. You can e.g. hardly find a PC-case any more, that is not "naturally modded" by the manufacturer, which is not a real mod in my opinion. I can't even count all the hardware features of my PCs that were never in use and will never be used.

And this is not only true for Computers, but for almost everything.

An excellent article. I feel the guilt of an impulse buyer. I have bought hardware simply because it had better reviews and more bling than I needed because of extra cash at the moment. I will say that the rigs I have are more than capable of handling my needs now and for a long while to come. I would like to build an Intel based unit with Ati graphics but that would be for fun.