At this point im afraid to ask

[Smokey.B]

Anyway for the ones who are sincerely appalled at my question (not the ones working for the shops) these thoughts are what I base my question on.

Even if a budget is not stated, it will almost always be asked for and subsequently maxed out. I'm actually guilty of doing that in my last built too but why do we do it that way ?

The other day a student specifically requested a build on Budget and threw out a figure he was willing to pay. It was of course maxed out.

Monitoring my actual usage I could have gone for lesser cores and probably slower gpu. Save the money for a brand new built in years to come when I rebuilt from scratch again as always.

1.) Price does not always equate to value/quality. ( key assumption)

2.) there is no such thing as future proofing

3.) you ended up playing mouse hunt with your gtx 970/ 980 ti

If you really buy house or car by first thinking of a budget before needs/wants then I guess we are different.

I am just thinking out loud not meant to take away rice bowl of anyone, the greater shift in e-commerce will do that instead.

 

[enenyi]

Anyway for the ones who are sincerely appalled at my question (not the ones working for the shops) these thoughts are what I base my question on.

Even if a budget is not stated, it will almost always be asked for and subsequently maxed out. I'm actually guilty of doing that in my last built too but why do we do it that way ?

It not only applies to the PC world, but also applies to other parts of our lives as well.

Let's just take a simple item, say a pair of jeans. You enter a store and you like a pair of branded jeans which cost about 300 bucks. You take out 300 bucks and pay for it willingly, coz that is what you find value for your money given your preference and financial status. But to someone else, that 300 bucks spent on a pair of branded jeans could have been better spent on 10 pairs of Uniqlo/Giordano/Baleno jeans that only cost 30 bucks a pair. To him, that pair of jeans that cost only 30 bucks is more value-for-money than the 300 bucks one, though no matter which pair of jeans he buys, the pair of jeans only serve a single purpose for him.

Take this simple illustration and extend it to other types of commerce that we do, like buying phones, buying computer hardware, buying cars, buying houses etc. All boil down to budget at some point or another, no matter how much you try to evade the topic of budget. It is precisely because of budget that you get to judge whether there is value in the purchase or not.

The other day a student specifically requested a build on Budget and threw out a figure he was willing to pay. It was of course maxed out.

Monitoring my actual usage I could have gone for lesser cores and probably slower gpu. Save the money for a brand new built in years to come when I rebuilt from scratch again as always.

And a few years later, you will ask the very same few questions. And then you will convince yourself to wait for another few years coz wait a few years more the prices would have dropped further and you can get the same products at a more 'value-for-money' price. Repeat the cycle a few times and you realise that you would not have bought anything after 10 over years, not because you are waiting for the value of the product to drop, but more because you never needed that product in the first place, hence you can afford to wait a few years for the prices to drop.

1.) Price does not always equate to value/quality. ( key assumption)

2.) there is no such thing as future proofing

3.) you ended up playing mouse hunt with your gtx 970/ 980 ti

If you really buy house or car by first thinking of a budget before needs/wants then I guess we are different.

I am just thinking out loud not meant to take away rice bowl of anyone, the greater shift in e-commerce will do that instead.

1) Already mentioned earlier.

2) Wrong. Future-proofing is entirely possible. Ask those who still run Sandy-Bridge era CPU chips like the i5-2600k and i7-2700k. They will tell u that the tangible improvement of Skylake's i5-6600k is not significant compared to Sandy Bridge's i5-2600k. If you actually sit down and think again, you will realise that most of the stuff we buy nowadays aren't really required; the older hardware can still run properly in today's context. More often than not it's our itchy fingers that can't resist the urge to 'upgrade' when we see something newer out on the market. Aided by e-commerce shops such as Lazada Singapore and Amazon, where you do not even need to patronise a shop to get that hardware you want.

3) Why not? So a Titan X/Fury X rig cannot be used for simple stuff like web-browsing? A high-speced rig must always be used for intensive purposes like gaming and 3D rendering?

 

[kandinsky]

Monitoring my actual usage I could have gone for lesser cores and probably slower gpu. Save the money for a brand new built in years to come when I rebuilt from scratch again as always.

But isn't this is with the benefit of hindsight? The person asking for a recommendation now, they may be thinking "Okay, I want my system to play this, do that, do that, I have budgeted X amount for all this, etc etc". If their actual usage changes after the build, who's fault is it for 'over/under-speccing' the system? Recommendations are just that, recommendations. It's still up to the TS/OP to carefully consider their own actual budget/needs and balance that. If they blindly built whatever someone recommended without considering their actual needs, it's very possible for them to one day come to the same conclusion as you, but that's only available with hindsight and experience. They have to make that mistake first.

Even if someone tells them now, "you only need i3/g3258 for what you want to do", you see how many ppl will insist on what they wanted to buy in the first place anyway. Have seen a number of those responses here. You can't police what people want to do with their money, even if it's against your advice.

If you want to help, you can also offer your alternative recommendation in those threads right, but don't get frustrated when people throw in back in your face and don't follow, lol