Worse With Age
21 Nov, 2009, 2:59 pm IST | Jamshed Avari
Forget about bargains on older parts. New low-end ones at the same price are usually better value.
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One of the most important functions we perform is to keep readers up to date about what’s going on in the markets and which products are the current best value-for-money picks. Unlike many other types of products, PC components have very short shelf lives. The pace of this industry results in new generations of major products roughly every year, and new models of individual parts at least three times as often. I’m not saying that all technology products are doomed to becoming useless within a few months of being purchased, but they might not remain the best choices for very long. Sadly, all products shipped out of a factory are not sold when they’re within their prime, and thousands of four- or five-year-old motherboards, graphics cards and game consoles lie in warehouses and store displays until they’re sold to unwitting customers. I can still see GeForce 6600 and Radeon X1950 cards which should have disappeared half a decade ago being sold on the streets at their original prices despite current models being available cheaper. Online stores have vast collections too, with almost no indication of product age. If you weren’t familiar with Nvidia and ATI’s businesses you might have no way of knowing how many new models have been released since these were good cards to buy. And if you didn’t study their naming and numbering schemes, you might never know whether a GeForce 8800GTX or a GeForce GTX280 is the better buy today. It’s not that they won’t work—you’d still get better graphics than most onboard systems can manage—but you won’t have any idea how much you’ve missed out on. These cards could still be great bargains if they were priced according to their ages, but that is rarely, if ever, the case. Assistant Editor – Technical CHIP India |
Tags: PC Components
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