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Old 12-31-2014, 04:56 PM   #33
Ganthrithor
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Koa View Post
so what's the difference when upgrading PCs?
In PC-land you usually upgrade for pure performance reasons. Just like modding a car for increased horsepower, squeezing more performance out of a PC is usually very expensive: either you go apeshit on the hardware you already have to squeeze another ~20-30% out of it (in which case you need to spend a bunch of money on things like a high-quality power supply, overclocking-oriented motherboard, and semi-exotic cooling-- just like doing a big turbo build on a car), or you bin the existing stuff and just swap to a different platform that will give you a lot more performance without resorting to any kind of manic craziness (in which case you spend a bunch of money on the new silicon).

In car-land you can dislike the way your car balances in a corner, and spend ~7% of the value of your car on a swaybar swap and boom, suddenly your face is covered in a giant smile. To do something like that in the PC world you'd have to be able to double your framerate in a game by adding some three-dollar, stick-on heatsinks to your GPU VRMs or something. There are very few meaningful improvements you can make to a PC for a tiny fraction of the PC's value (the only exception would be adding RAM or a SSD to a really old, cheap machine that was seriously under-specced to begin with).
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