Slashdot Mirror
Gaming PC Makers Take Aim at Lucrative Niche
Cymage writes "Yahoo (Reuters) reports that gaming PCs are now a high profit area, and that the bigger players (Dell, HP) are trying to get into the market: 'In an age when a new PC can cost just a few hundred dollars, an adolescent need for speed is creating a profitable niche for souped-up gaming computers at the ultra-costly end of the market.' How many people really spend $5,000 on a gaming machine? Mine cost less than $2,000, and I can play UT2k4 and others on it just fine."
I bought my Athlon XP 2200+ and ECS motherboard for $70 from fry's, 1 gig of ram for $200 after rebates, and a Radeon 9800 non-pro for $150. Overclocked the cpu to 3200+ speed and flashed the 9800 to a pro. A new large hard drive will cost you about $100, a decent case + power supply $50, and all the "other stuff" maybe $100 total.
That's under $800 for a top-of-the-line system, when I got it.
People who spend $400 on a 512 meg ram module because it does 2-2-2 timing are just dumb, and have money to burn.
~Berj
Of course, most premade systems are still "lacking" for serious gaming, and not everyone can "roll their own" computer.
Murphy was an optimist.
I almost started a business doing this once. Then I saw Falcon Northwest and Alienware and realized that there wasn't room in the market for another one.
I figured that as PCs became commoditized and as commonplace as your average toaster that the elitists of the world would want some way to stratify PC ownership. Same reason that there are Kias, and there are Porsches. The small-penis crowd needs to validate itself through what it owns.
Seriously? I can see $2k or even $3k when you deck everything out.... but all the $5k gaming machines I've seen are either gaming laptops, or have $2k worth of multiple monitors hooked up.
And that brings up the one big difference of computers vs. consoles, if you shell out this kind of cash for a computer, you'll likely be able to re-use several parts of it when it goes by the wayside.
-truth
I had a steady B+ in my AI class until I failed the Turing test...
About 5 years ago, I built a 233 Mhz Pentium II machine for about $500. Each year, I put $100 - $200 into hardware upgrades and I have a machine that will very comfortably play today's games (ex. Tron 2.0, Vice City, UT2K4) and I still haven't spent more than $1500. On top of that, I was able to Frankenstein some parts from the old computer and buy a $30 case/power supply and I now have a spare computer that can read e-mail, surf the net, and play games along the age of RA2, Quake 3, and UT.
Instead of spending 5K over 5 years, spend a steady 1K per year in upgrades. You will be worse off after 1 year, less so after 2 years, and break-even after 3 years. Years 4 and 5 you will be ahead of the game.
And the "badness" of being behind is much greater than the "goodness" of being ahead. Running a current game at 500 FPS does not buy you much when a monitor runs at 75-85 Hz. But in 5 years, your favorite game may be 10 FPS, which would suck big time!
Besides, explaining a 1K purchase to the wife is a LOT easier than explaining a 5K one.
Just my humble opinion. It is worth every penny of what you paid for it.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
Intel Pentium 4/ 2.8C GHz 800MHz FSB, 512K Cache $180
ATI RADEON 9800PRO Video Card, 128MB DDR $222
1Gb RAM Corsair TwinX1024-4400 $435
Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy2 ZS Platinum $165
Maxtor 250GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive $207
ASUS "P4C800-E DELUXE" i875P Chipset Motherboard $179
SubTotal: 1388
Add the case, the keyboard and the mouse... I really don't see how you can get a gaming maching for more than 3k...
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
It's nice to see somebody from the community on /., Gunslinger
Most people who don't know how to build a computer also don't care about speed. They don't understand things like compatibility and generations. Most of them think "i'll buy an expansion card and make my computer fast".
If people want hardcore gaming rigs all they need to do is /server irc.enterthegame.com.
Steal This Sig
This attitude seems to be floating around a lot, but WHY??? Why does the desire to play games at high resolution with high frame rates necessarily equal a person whith a high GQ (geek quotient)?
I can easily see somebody who works as a carpenter for a living wanting to come home and frag a little. Maybe they want more than what a PS2 or suXBox can provide. Maybe they would be a little nervous at providing their own tech support. Maybe they have more money than time.
But I must admit that I would have trouble spending $2K on a machine if I tried, much less $5K.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
Speaking as an ex-latest-greatest buyer... In computing power, you get very diminishing returns on bleeding edge gear. Furthermore, you might have even more headaches with getting support and functioning drivers for the latest-greatest. As most have mentioned, you need to find that sweet spot, which right now, is less than $1000.
Two of the four pc's I've bought were "top-end". In both cases, certain big names hastily pushed out their parts and I got stuck with lemons with crippled performance. My last PC was only $700 and it smokes. (Go AMD!)
But go ahead, keep doing what you doing, if it makes you feel better in your mind. I know it makes my wallet feel better when prices get bumped down.
Hecubas
...
[somewebsite.com]
Post From: Berj
Subject: PC Freezes and textures tear
Hi guys, I recently bought Doom3 and my system is having trouble after I ran it. Now the rest of my games seem to lock up more often and I never had any problems before installing Doom3. I have the latest drivers and DirectX installed and working properly.
Is anyone else having this problem?
I spend more time on my computer than in my car. Why not spend a little extra to get a good one.
Because you don't have to.
A computer is increasingly complex piece of machinery. Personally I think you have to take each piece individually. The only part I spend extra on to "get a good one" is the monitor. And those can last you 10 years.
Unfortunately, what worked oh-so well for the SNES was one of the major reasons for the ultimate lack of relevancy the N64 had, and now the relative obscurity of the GameCube.
While Nintendo has focused on quality, Sony looked to sheer number of titles for sale, and it would seem Sonys approach worked.
If you walk into a store and were to pick up any random game for the Game Cube, chances are that, assuming it was a genre you liked, it will be a good game. Not so with the PS2. The thing is, while games for nintendo systems, especially games produced by nintendo themselves, tend to be very refined and lots of fun, they are rarely revolutionary.
Don't get me wrong, I love all my nintendo consoles dearly, but if they want to compete with Sony they need to loosen up on what titles they will release (though it looks to me like nintendo is not looking to compete directly with Sony and MS, and is instead seeking a niche market. The relationship between Nintendo and Sony is much like that between Microsoft and Apple I think, with Sony gladling pushing out gobs of mass market games, while nintendo caters to it's own niche of enthusiasts)
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
Read the base specs for Doom 3. That PIII aint' gonna run it at all. Have a look at the minimum specs for Thief 3. If you want to play with all the bells and whistles, you need a current rig. My machine is 2 years old, and its starting to show its age. I've been holding off, but the very recent jump in min specs, specifically for Doom 3 will push me over into upgrade land
If only we could fall into a woman's arms without falling into her hands
While many hard core gamers and definitely the slashdot crowd knows how to put together a good gaming PC on the cheap, the majority of the people who are going to be buying these machines really don't understand the difference between a hard drive and a video card.
My cousin bought an hp pavillion about a year ago (against my recommendation, but that's irrelevant now) the specs on it were:
- 1.2gz celeron
- 128meg PC100 SDRAM
- 56k v90 modem
- 20gb hard drive
- some sort of non-3d accellerated 8mb video card
- yadda yadda yadda
well the other day he went and got Final Fantasy XI and couldn't understand why it wouldn't run. Instead of calling me, they decided that they needed a faster "modem" and "more hard drive" so they went and paid some exorbant amount of money to have a v.92 modem and a 250gb hard drive installed.When the game still wouldn't install, they finally called me because someone had told them to go buy a new Alienware machine so they could play final fantasy on it, and they wanted to know which one to buy.
I ended up going over and just upgrading the ram to 512meg and trading them the GeForce 4 I had in one of my machines that is now a server for the cheapo video card.
The point is, I suspect that a lot of high end gaming rig sales come from consumers who really have no idea what they need.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
Just yesterday I priced out a very high end gaming machine for $3k (the CPU alone, no monitor / keyboard / mouse etc -- sweet p4 3.4 EE / 2 GB corsair / 2x200GB SATA Raid 0 / heatsink etc. / sweet case / 550 Power / ATI x800 256MB)
That $3k computer worth of parts can only be made possible by knowledge of the system and optimized for performance by mastery of hardware tweaking and overclocking.
The $400 machines for sale on Dell take relatively little knowledge to put together. The expensive machiens by vendors such as Alienware include much more knowledge about the interworkings and optimizations of the individual parts.
Since duplicating this knowledge is free, that is where the profit to be made is.
The only problem I would have with this is the people who will be wasting their money buying these high end gaming machines when they only need the mid range Dell machines.