Quote:
Originally Posted by Ganthrithor
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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7% value of a car is a swaybar? I didn't realize they cost $1500-2000
I get what you're saying.. but perhaps the analogy could use some refinement. It's not a terrible one but extracting more from one's car isn't exactly cheap either when it comes to base performance. There are a lot of tweaks one can do with their PC for free that simply aren't possible on cars, as well, which goes complicates your analogy being relevant and accurate of what's at hand. Perceived benefit, I can see your analogy shining. People love to throw on bushings and whatnot and exclaim how drastically different their car handles, only weeks later that feeling is gone (perceived benefit = first time driving it after they threw on the mod
happens all the time).
Realistically though the two are not apples to oranges so it's not easy to quantify through dollar amounts/upgrade alone.