The future of PCs and Macs is expensive

[Skybird]

I would not go with intel 7th generation chips currently, they are overpriced and offer not sufficient gain to give them performance advantage over 6th generation CPUs that does not show just in laboratory numbers, but is also visible to the user. Wait until 8th generaton, or buy 6th generation.

I also still tend to favour desktop PC over notebook, although my non-gaming stuff now all is run from notebook. That is only because space and plug concerns, I have not enough room to have two desktop PC set up. But repairing or maintaining a desktop always is cheaper, and leaves you easier options for upgrading and repairing. Also, typing at a desktop keyboard is much better than on a notebook.

The Surface line by Microsoft is haunted by hooks and issues, since beginning. Thats is what is to be read in non-pro Microsoft tech blogs and tech sites. Windows 10 did not make these things work more reliable, but added to their problems. Many W10 updates caused havoc for Surface users. The by now well documented battery issues did not make it any better.

Currently kind of a dispute is going on, on Microsoft's claimed numbers of Windows-platforms. It seems they are no good news for MS:

http://www.computerworld.com/article...-slowdown.html

http://www.businessinsider.com/right...e-2011-12?IR=T

500 million Windows 7 licenses sold in the last two years. It's a safe bet that more than 80% of those licenses were sold on new PCs, which means there are at least 400 million active Windows 7 users today. (Some licenses might have been bought by corporations for upgrades, but not yet deployed.)

Half a billion Windows users have gone amiss mysteriously, it seems:

https://www.askwoody.com/2016/the-my...windows-users/

To call PCs a "niche" now, is exaggerated, and will remain to be so for some more years to come. "Niche" to me sounds like something with a market share of 5% or less or so...

[Commander Wallace]

Originally Posted by Skybird

I would not go with intel 7th generation chips currently, they are overpriced and offer not sufficient gain to give them performance advantage over 6th generation CPUs that does not show just in laboratory numbers, but is also visible to the user. Wait until 8th generaton, or buy 6th generation.

I also still tend to favour desktop PC over notebook, although my non-gaming stuff now all is run from notebook. That is only because space and plug concerns, I have not enough room to have two desktop PC set up. But repairing or maintaining a desktop always is cheaper, and leaves you easier options for upgrading and repairing. Also, typing at a desktop keyboard is much better than on a notebook.

The latest generation of Intel processors offer a little more processing power but for most users, not enough to justify the costs as you said. The older generation Intel CPU's can also be overclocked to a point where they rival the latest offerings from Intel.

As an alternative, a number of our forum members have built their own computers utilizing multi core AMD CPU's and have reported excellent results. AMD CPU's ran inherently hot years ago and a rule of thumb in using the AMD chips was to have increased cooling systems. This is no longer the case as the AMD A8 Quad core runs incredibly cool in a laptop.

Top tier Lap tops that are built today, as Neal said, feature dedicated video cards and in some case, dual hard drives not to mention top of the line CPU's. These units are capable of everyday tasks and more than capable of playing most games on relatively high settings. The integrated video card on most units are also good enough to play most games on reduced settings if one has to make any changes at all.

Most hard core gamers however, still prefer the computer desktop where one can install a physically large video card and in the case of an SLI configuration, install 2 video cards to run in series to give top tier Video effects. Most people in this group also tend to run water cooled chilling units as well.

http://www.xidax.com/products/deskto...led%20Computer

Luckily, End users today have a vast number of options to choose from when considering a computer purchase.


Edit. Quote - SLI is an algorithm of parallel processing for computer graphics, meant to increase the processing power available for graphics. Further, this is for connecting 2 or more Video cards together. According to this article, 3 and 4 can be used.

Quote : Implementation[edit]

SLI allows two, three, or four graphics processing units (GPUs) to share the workload when rendering real-time 3D computer graphics. Ideally, identical GPUs are installed on the motherboard that contains enough PCI-Express slots, set up in a master-slave configuration.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Link_Interface