Back-to-School Desktop Deals You'll Want to Avoid
Posted by Eric Dahl | Thursday, August 17, 2006 6:54 PM PT
Well, it's back-to-school-time again, which means every retail outlet under the sun is pushing hard to sell PCs. And with Intel's
extremely fast Core 2 Duo chips starting to take over the desktop market and push down prices on older, slower tech you'd think that the retail outlets would have some pretty sweet deals. Unfortunately, that's not what I'm seeing.
One of my coworkers here mentioned she was looking at new PCs and wondered if this season's retail deals were worth pursuing. I took a quick look through the Sunday ads for
Best Buy,
CompUSA,
Office Depot--all the usual suspects--and found some pretty unimpressive results.
Retail PCs around the $1000 mark shared a pretty common set of specs: 2GB of RAM, a 250GB hard drive, integrated graphics, a 17-inch LCD, and either an Athlon 64 X2 4200+ or a Pentium D 915 chip. That's OK, I guess. Problem is, in a month or so, you'll be able to buy a much faster low-end Core 2 Duo system for the same price. How do I know that? Simple. You can get one online right now.
See here's the interesting thing about Intel's Core 2 Duo line: It's already available across most of the price spectrum.
NewEgg has the low-end Core 2 Duo E6300 chip for $203. That's cheap enough to provide the backbone for a respectable $1000 system. And sure enough,
HP Shopping, or
CyberPower, and pretty much any other build-to-order vendor will let you configure a $1000 PC with everything you'll find from a retail box, plus the much faster CPU.
While it's hardly news that boxed, retail configurations lag behind build-to-order machines in adopting the latest technology, it's rare that a next generation CPU would target the mainstream PC market so quickly. In this case, Core 2 Duo just happened to roll out a little bit too late to make it into mainstream retail PCs for the back-to-school crowd.
So if you're shopping for a new PC for yourself or your college student, do yourself a favor: Shop online or wait until mainstream Core 2 Duo systems show up in retail. For the same money you'll get a much faster system.
Having a vested interest in advancing technology (without it you'd be out of a job) you need to push the latest, fastest, state-of-the-art wigit no matter if it's needed or not.
As a parent and a high school teacher, the overwhelming majority of users I know can do very well with CPU's in the Duron/Celeron/Sempron family with components to match.
Hard drives that are too big tend to have people put all their eggs in one basket ... and those baskets do fail my friend. Far better to have two 120s and teach (or automate) internal backup.
But keep up the good work, America has always wanted the biggest and fastest. We must, we keep buying gas guzzlers and the price of gasoline just keeps climbing so maybe we do need horse power we never use.
Doug,....how would you know???. I'm over 40 and an avid gamer, the cpu's you mentioned , wouldn't play a modern game ,or for that matter, in some cases, even install, on systems with those , extreme, low end components, let alone a good video editing or cad program.The" overwhelming majority" in your world, are children, try spending a little more time with adults. All the people I know , have a vested intrest in tech, and use it vigorusly, in their work and at play.You are living in a bubble.
No bubble young man; you just have no sense of value. Do what you want with you money. But the "normal" people who use a computer as a tool or a toy just don't need the power you seem to relish. Do you drive an SUV or maybe ride a Harley?
No more for me here, you've made my day and my point. I thank you for that.
And keep making us low end users the toys you do. I love it. You do understand what gaming is in a larger sense don't you? You know the game of fishing say ... drop the bait in to see what sucker bites it? How's that cricket Mr Bass???
I agree with some of what Doug's points are. A 925 chip PC with 2G of Ram and a 200G hard drive would be a good base system for anyone, even a gamer. A gamer would want a seperate graphics card. There is not much of a tradeoff in playing current games on such a system. Resolutions can't be as high as on the high-end sytems, but realistically look quite good, with more than adequate performance on a 1280 X 1024 LCD display. Granted, some eye candy would have to be turned off, but in the playability of the game, it doesn't take away from the immersion factor of any of the good games on the market now.
When I read reviews of performance tests on PC's for games, it seems the reviewers make a point of trying to push the display size to rediculous proportions, far beyond what the majority of players would actually play. The reviews are of cutting edge, or wannabe machines. Saying a moderate machine is good enough would not drive sales of new machines.