You could go spend your time researching the best of breed in each
component - video card, hard drive, mother board, etc. Then you go
and get those best-of-breed parts, and find that they just don't work
well together. The video card draws more current on the 5v line than
the motherboard is comfortable with and you end up hard-locking
after three hours due to the regulator overheating. Perhaps you find
that the video card just plain doesn't get along with that RAID array on
the same PCI bus.
Or you could just buy an Apple computer and realise that the hard
work has already been done for you. Sure, even Apple computers have
problems sometimes - this just highlights the difficulty of getting all
the various components to work together.
The DIY crowd love to crow about how good their machines are, but
then they'll just conveniently forget the fact that they have got into the
habit of pausing their WoW raids for 5 minutes every hour so they can
reboot before the motherboard overheats. Or they have the side off
the case with a fan blowing cool air into it. Or they have the can of
spray-on-coolant with the extension pipe so they can spray coolant
over the processor every half hour, through the fan slot on the side of
the case.
One thing that the race to the bottom has taught users is that
computers aren't supposed to be reliable, and it's normal to have to do
silly things to make them work smoothly.
Discussion on:
Message 13 of 1
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