3 ms·
I've owned desktops for the last 25 years and never found I could easily upgrade. It's the promise but not the reality. New video card? Need a new power sup
by snarfy 10y ago
I've owned desktops for the last 25 years and never found I could easily upgrade. It's the promise but not the reality. New video card? Need a new power supply too. More ram? Need a new motherboard. New CPU? Same deal.
I'm switching back to a desktop because I rarely use the portability of a laptop.
- Eridrus 10y agoYou're not wrong that there are dependencies, but it's nowhere near as expensive as buying a whole new computer. I bought a desktop in 2011, added an SSD a few years ago, then added 16 GB of RAM (second hand, bringing me to 24GB) and replaced my graphics card with a Maxwell Titan X (also second hand) last year. It's a very good system for running state of the art deep learning experiments on now. Cost me ~600 for the upgrades last year. You couldn't even buy a laptop with these specs. I bought a steam link and 2 controllers for ~150 last year to play co-op games with my wife, much cheaper than a console with the added benefit of my existing steam collection and Steam holiday sales! I may have gotten lucky, because I sure as shit don't know what I'm doing picking components, but the fact that I can get lucky probably means there's a way to pick things with headroom intentionally.
- pjmlp 10y agoDepends on the system. For example, recently I got a 2011 PC from someone that didn't want to keep it on its new flat, and I cannot upgrade the GPU to a DX12/Vulkan one, because they all require PCI Express 3.0 and the motherboard only supports v1.0. It is cheaper to get a whole new computer, like a NUC, than starting the cascade of updates.