First off, I would like to welcome you all to my first Kudos & Calamities column. I’m kram – many of you may have seen me around in the forums (kram 2.0) or read some of my past articles. As many of you may already know, Tyler was named the PC Mechanic Public Relations Manager. As a result of Tyler’s move, he asked me to take over his portion of the column, writing every other week alongside thefultonhow. My thanks to Tyler for providing me this opportunity and I wish him the best of luck at his new post.
Onto the meat of this week’s column. One of the several things that make a person successful in any walk of life is the ability to look ahead. For a politician, it maybe predicting events and advocating an appropriate cause. For an inventor, it is about predicting people’s needs for the future. For a student, it may be foreseeing a dreaded pop quiz.
But for a computer technician, it’s more than that.
As a computer builder, one of the most common questions that I’m asked is “will this computer last me x amount of years?” In fact, I just built a nice $1000 system for a friend of mine who’s off to school for the next four years. The computer will have to last for the next four years of his schooling. I have to sit and think about it for a while – what turns will technology take in the next few years? What demands will software coders ask of hardware? And as a more pertinent question – how can I build for the future?
Quite frankly, I don’t know. Nothing short of a fortune teller could answer that.
When I built my current system about a year and a half back, I was very fortunate. I felt like a psychic. I built an Intel Pentium 4 2.8C Northwood processor with 512 MB DDR RAM (now 1GB), along with an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro and an 80GB Seagate HDD. I was prepared for it to depreciate; that’s just how computer technology goes. Specifically with my processor – with Moore’s law governing its growth, it was a falling premium. Just then, Intel implemented the “PNI” – Prescott New Instruction set – to the Pentium 4 NetBurst processors. One of the main reasons for tacking on PNI was to set the theoretical clockspeed limit much higher. And theoretically, the Pentium 4 Prescott Processors can clock much higher, contingencies set aside. Wonderful – for a long time, Intel’s processor performance was synonymous to its clockspeed. Then, Intel hit a heat-related speed barrier. All of a sudden, my Pentium 4 2.8 Northwood’s value, both in terms of cash and performance, took a steep rise.
Now why did I go off on a tangent about my processor? Simple – I want to point out that it’s all about luck -little else involved in it. I decided I needed a build come September and so I built it. Sure, you could look a few months ahead in technology; for example, we see the rise of dual core processors in areas such as games. In the long term, however, it is impossible to determine what technology holds for us. Not even CEOs Bill Gates or Steve Jobs knows.
I also want to note that new technology will not make the ‘old’ technology obsolete as soon as it comes out. New technology needs to be introduced, adopted, and accepted before it becomes a viable contender to push the ‘old’ out. Just look at, for example, the MS Windows 2000 operating system. Granted it’s old, but it’s still widely used by many home and business users. And with the new 64-bit operating systems; it’s not going to push 32-bit programs and OSes aside on release day. It’s going to be gradually adopted.
What should you do right now if you are inclined to build? I’d recommend building with what’s out there right now with the future in mind. Don’t let the developing technology completely distract you from your needs. The nature of open competition and capitalism is that components always improve. For example, take a look at the graphics card market right now. ATI and nVidia, the two giants, are releasing cores and revisions and new cards left and right. It’s a full-time job to keep up with them! nVidia released SLi. ATI followed with Crossfire. Now what? Socket-based GPUs? Quite possible, in fact, very likely. But if you know that you will need your system for high-powered 3D gaming, any high-end graphics card (Radeon X1900 series, GeForce 7800 series) will do. If you work with multimedia applications, you know that a processor which will take advantage of the multi-threaded application will be the one. In that case, look for something like a dual-core or a SMT processor.
Technology depreciates. You have to put a stop somewhere – or else you’d never get your computer built!
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