Would you pay extra for an easy PC gaming experience?

[gundato]

you just set yourself up for a fail. Dell uses rebranded Asetek watercooling kits that are worse than air cooling in most cases.

Dell also (in many of their lines) use sub-par hardware and overcharge everything.

OH MAH GAWDZ!!! WE JUST PROVEDED THAT COMPUTERS CAN'T BE MASS PRODUCED IN MASHY'S WORLD!!!! :p

If you are getting back to "nobody has made a good mass produced computer", then you probably are missing the point, but sure, whatever. But if your point is still "You need highly trained sandwich artisans to make this", then you are still kind of an idiot :p

[mashakos]

2. It is not difficult to build your own PC. Heck even a water cooling system is easy to install, but can be a pain in the arse to maintain properly. Gaming hardware has become affordable and efficient enough that you don't need to overclock anymore or install some fancyschmancy water cooling. CPUs and GPUs have become so energy efficient that they don't heat up as much as in ye olde days. So building a high performance AND silent system on air cooling is easily possible.

you're talking about something that's completely different: a barebones PC that can run games. A sort of console-like if you will. You're looking at PCs traditionally: a tower that has Windows 7 and a bunch of games on it, that needs to be upgraded in a year or two. No mention of 5 year performance viability, running exotic things like console emulators, extreme graphical mods, dual booting Mac OSX or multi-seat computing, no compromise small form factor design, or a unified frontend.

You haven't mentioned any of the above because you probably haven't experienced any of them up close outside of youtube. That's ok, you're not supposed to know everything under the sun.
People tend to appreciate cool stuff when it becomes practical and within reach. Multi-touch has been around probably for 20 years, people generally ignored it. The concept didn't become appealing till it was presented in the form of the iphone and later the ipad. Sure, most people caught on once more variety was introduced when Android devices hit the market, but initially the introduction of the iphone brought mass appeal to the technology.

[mashakos]

If you are getting back to "nobody has made a good mass produced computer", then you probably are missing the point, but sure, whatever. But if your point is still "You need highly trained sandwich artisans to make this", then you are still kind of an idiot :p

You're sticking to your argument using an example that has clearly been shown to be inapplicable. What is that called?

EDIT: Just to be crystal clear - an Asetek or Coolermaster watercooling kit is a bad water cooling solution whether Dell or the Pope uses it in their PC production line.

[strange headache]

No mention of 5 year performance viability, running exotic things like console emulators, extreme graphical mods, dual booting Mac OSX or multi-seat computing, no compromise small form factor design, or a unified frontend.

I dunno, that looks like a very very VERY restricted focus group to me. Are there really that many people fiddling around with high-end emulators (I can run emulators up to ps2 without much hassle on my pretty standard gaming rig)? Does a large customer base even care about graphical mods and injectors? I really doubt it.

You want to sell high-end custom made systems to a niche market AND offer extremely low prices? How do you intend to do that with these crazy low profit margins on computer hardware? Even more, you want highly trained stuff with high wages to put all this together. Just consider me sceptical.

Sure a small form factor might be nice, but to be honest I doubt it's very important for most people who are rather looking for a decent price/performance ratio. Furthermore restricting your market by addressing yourself to aficionados, who are not only interested in emulating and "extreme graphical mods", but are also pretty well off financially. Besides it's not like small gaming cubes for under 1.000€ wouldn't exist.

Lastly, in my opinion, buying a ultra high-end PC for a 5 year performance viability is rather stupid. For example, I'd rather buy a mid-range graphics card now and in 2-3 years I'll buy simply buy a newer mid-range card. SLI is simply stupid and overpriced even for a power gamer. Same goes for water-cooling.

See, I am not debating that people like to buy cool practical stuff. I am simply doubting that your product is very practical at all. No offense.

[gundato]

You're sticking to your argument using an example that has clearly been shown to be inapplicable. What is that called?

EDIT: Just to be crystal clear - an Asetek or Coolermaster watercooling kit is a bad water cooling solution whether Dell or the Pope uses it in their PC production line.

How is the example inapplicable? The discussion is not "Does Dell use quality hardware?" but instead "Can poorly trained sweat shop laborers install a water cooling system?"


And it is like strange is saying: what is the point?

If someone just wants to buy a pre-made PC, there is really no reason for them to NOT get either a mid-range system or something like Alienware (which, while expensive, are actually fairly decent). This isn't the 90s when tech was changing rapidly. Many games still have minimum specs of a dual core and something on the order of the 8800 GT. So if you are the kind of person who just WANTS lots of power (like me :p), then you build your own rig or you get a pre-built and upgrade stuff.

But mashy, if you really think the world NEEDS what you have a hard-on for: Go set up a web site (or even just use ebay) and make and sell them yourself. The odds are you won't have so many sales that you get overwhelmed and you can sell it at those profit margins that you oh so desperately want. And if you DO get a huge set of sales, take the time to go to your local college and recruit a few kids who will listen to you as you teach them the sacred art of basic motor skills.

[mashakos]

See, I am not debating that people like to buy cool practical stuff. I am simply doubting that your product is very practical at all. No offense.

the ipod wouldn't have been very practical without itunes, at least for the normal user not prone to pirating mp3's. There has to be a bigger picture than a fancy piece of hardware, hint hint. (and no, it's not digital distribution of software)

[somini]

again, you just don't see the nuance...
Designing a 3 x 120mm radiator, dual pump, fully water cooled, overclocked SLI configuration on a PC case that is half the size of a HAF-X and keeping the rig quiet on top of all of that is not easy. Translating that design into a production line is near Herculean.

Trust me, if you were offered a $1000 PC that is miles beyond anything you can build on your own for the same price or even more, you'd want one.

Watch out for the big man, if you can devise a way to mass produce a better PC for $1000 you will bankrupt Alienware, they are lurking around here.

This is history in the making folks. What we have here is an entrepreneur. Every sane people will say his ideas are horrible because they don't live in their fairy tale of a world of his, but one in a million will change the world! Mashakos just don't understand that he is the 99,9999% that fail. If he is a real entrepreneur he will ignore us and pawn his house to pay for his dream. Then is back to eating ramen for the rest of his life.

My (sincere) recommendation is preparing some slick-looking presentations and try and sell it to Valve or something, I hear they are looking to new hardware solutions. Make sure you email the guy in charge, not the mail full of game submissions.

[somini]

good point, win7 doesn't really need tuning. What I meant was "more user friendly tweaking". So things like:
1. installing and configuring a codec pack for native mkv,mp4,mov,avi,ts support as well as intelligent subtitle detection (that needs a bit of time to tweak).
2. adding a few convenience utilities that can be utilised by custom automated software provided by the manufacturer. Apps like Core Affinity Resident, ShellFolderFix, NTCore's 4GB Patch and Link Shell Extension
3. installing psd,tga codecs so you can view photoshop and targa files in windows photo viewer or paint. Also thumbnails ould be visible for these file types

This thread is really amazing, some great gems here.
Codec packs? Why use WMP if you are savvy enough to know what a codec is? CoreAffinity?4GB patch, really? What other use has that other than Skyrim (because Bethesda are worse coders than Obsidian)
Reinstalling Windows for the Disc, installing VLC and IrfanView and some arcane utilities can already be made with Ninite, I think they sell personalized packages.
All that other stuff is a matter of personal preference, you can't have a mass produced personalized stuff, it's a contradiction. If the person in question is willing to pay through the roof, I assume it has no personal preference and uses the default settings for everything, so all the tweaking is worthless.

[Moraven]

Companies wanted to make the 1GB thingies because they were cheap and easier to sell. There were other HDD mp3 players but were big and had horid interfaces. Apple jumped on the mp3 craze caused by CD-Rs and Napster and the cheapest way to get more space was HDD. There was demand, but no one had come up with a good overall product. The size was good, interface was the best and good marketing. They did not pull demand out of a hat.


High end water cooling is rather niche and the people who get into it typically know what they are doing already.

Trust me, if you were offered a $1000 PC that is miles beyond anything you can build on your own for the same price or even more, you'd want one.

Sure. Which will not happen. Unless you plan to subsidy purchases for everyone here. SLI and watercooling is not that big of a market in the first place. Premiums are charged so high because you get so few orders you have to stay out of the black somehow. They been around long enough to know how many they expect to sell and how much they can sell it for. To many of us here its seems like gouging since we can easily put something together.

[Kadayi]

The whole mac/pc thing reminds me of 'Zen & the art of motorcycle maintenance' and the whole Romantic/classical paradigm Pirsig talks about, namely some people want the experience of motorcycling (computing) without the pain (dealing with hardware), where as for others, that's all part of the experience.

Your Apple home consumer is firmly in your romantic camp. They are always buying out of convenience, because they just want something that they turn on and works, and that's what Apple makes, namely products that work out of the box, and they put their faith in Apples (ill founded) reputation that everything will indeed 'just work' (our IT server room with it's graveyard of dead macs is a firm testament to the fact that it's more a case of 'just work for a few years' in truth). These people aren't going to worry about chipsets or GPU power, they believe Apple will sell them capable machines. They might fuss a bit over over Ram and HDD space, but principally they just want to know that Creative suite or Office for Mac will run on it. Not whether they will run well, just whether they'll run. As long as the bike moves they're happy.

Your power PC user however is the opposite. They're your classical thinker. Sure it's a pain in the ass initially sorting out your system specs and researching which parts to get, and in fact you might well get someone else to put the thing together for you out of convenience, but ultimately it's your machine at the end of the day. You've crafted it and there's a certain level of joy & satisfaction in that, as there is in maintaining it and getting the most out of the hardware you've got. That doesn't necessarily mean OCing to hell (I don't bother with that nowadays tbh), but ensuring the systems up to date, the drivers, software etc, and everything is optimised.

A couple of times at work I've been rather bemused by colleagues who get exasperated over the fact that they can't save a file they've been working on, only to find out that the root cause as to why they can't save it is down to their Macs hard drive being full to bursting point. One guy (rather tragically) lost about 6 years worth of family photos when his hard drive decided to fail, simply because it didn't occur to him to actually back those sort of things up. The idea that his mac might fail wasn't something he'd ever thought about. It's not a mindset I understand as a PC home builder, but at the same time I don't concern myself with car maintenance much beyond occasionally checking the oil and tyre pressure, even though I drive over 400 miles a week simply because all I care about is getting to the office & back again. It's all about priorities at the end of the day. I'm happy to pay my garage to service the car once a year so I don't have to get my hands dirty.

Is there crossover? sure. But I'd say it comes in the form of PC users who buy Laptops & pre-built high end tower systems (your Alienware type purchasers). If there's a market to explore it's there, and beyond hardware it probably comes in the form of optimising and pre-installing software for customers based on their needs and maybe in transferring over files and folders for them from their existing machine. All that's required there is establishing what their ecosystem is (gmail/hotmail/yahoo etc, etc) as well as what browser/software/hardware they are using or likely to use, installing it all and being good to go.

[Grizzly]

Mashkakos, I would really appreciate it if you take your insecurities elsewhere. Going onto a PC gaming forum and assuming that no one has ever done a water cooling system, and worse, even shouting down those who obviously have experience in the field just makes you look like a prick.
This is generally considered to be a bad thing.

So please, PLEASE just rein it in will yah?

[mashakos]

Mashkakos, I would really appreciate it if you take your insecurities elsewhere. Going onto a PC gaming forum and assuming that no one has ever done a water cooling system, and worse, even shouting down those who obviously have experience in the field just makes you look like a prick.
This is generally considered to be a bad thing.

So please, PLEASE just rein it in will yah?

I seriously doubt it.

This guy just straight up displayed his ignorance:

From your picture, it looks like two video cards mounted on a mobo, a power supply in the upper right, and a few tubes encasing the cables. Nothing spectacular.

This other guy thinks I posted a picture of my own rig:

Congratulations, you have a water-cooled rig.

Do you want a cookie?

Honestly, this shit ain't rocket science.

when in fact it was a gallery image from a branded PC I was talking about earlier:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/foru...l=1#post240396

[Grizzly]

I seriously doubt it.

This guy just straight up displayed his ignorance:

Aaaand there you go. I asked you to rein it in, why can't you? Atleast Gundato had the decency to apologize for his mistake. His initial point wasn't really wrong either. Even for a high performance PC (Say this one), It's just plugging stuff in in the correct order, according to the manual. Sure, water cooling might be a little bit more difficult, but why the fuck do you need water cooling?

This other guy thinks I posted a picture of my own rig:


when in fact it was a gallery image from a branded PC I was talking about earlier:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/foru...l=1#post240396

Actually, when you take Nalano's line "Gratz, you have watercooling", nothing in that statement appears to be false. You do have water cooling, otherwise you wouldn't make statements about it's alledged difficulty of installation. Besides, it says nothing about his PC knowledge, nor the PC knowledge of people in general on this site.

The point is that you are shouting down people for no bloody reason. Please cease doing that.

[mashakos]

Aaaand there you go. I asked you to rein it in, why can't you? Atleast Gundato had the decency to apologize for his mistake. His initial point wasn't really wrong either. Even for a high performance PC (Say this one), It's just plugging stuff in in the correct order, according to the manual. Sure, water cooling might be a little bit more difficult, but why the fuck do you need water cooling?

How big is that case in that guide you posted? 3 feet tall? Even a retard can put together a watercooling kit in something that gigantic. My point is that it's much, much more complicated to do the same on a case that is 15" high or less.
Only someone who has no idea what I'm talking about would casually dismiss the importance of space when watercooling is concerned.

Actually, when you take Nalano's line "Gratz, you have watercooling", nothing in that statement appears to be false.

except for the general lack of attention to detail.

[TechnicalBen]

when in fact it was a gallery image from a branded PC I was talking about earlier:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/foru...l=1#post240396

Then someone else is already doing what you propose. Either work with them, copy them, or don't. But either way, don't pretend it's a "new!TM" idea. :P

[mashakos]

Then someone else is already doing what you propose. Either work with them, copy them, or don't. But either way, don't pretend it's a "new!TM" idea. :P

did you actually open the link you quoted in your post?

[Grizzly]

How big is that case in that guide you posted? 3 feet tall? Even a retard can put together a watercooling kit in something that gigantic. My point is that it's much, much more complicated to do the same on a case that is 15" high or less.
Only someone who has no idea what I'm talking about would casually dismiss the importance of space when watercooling is concerned.

1) Who said something about building water cooling systems into that rig? My point is that a rig like that does not need water cooling.
2) Nobody has, so far, dismissed the importance of space when watercooling is concerned, as it has not been brought up in the discussion so far
3) You just said that even a retard can put together a water cooling, proving exactly what Gundato was saying.

except for the general lack of attention to detail.

4) Which still gives you no leeway to act superiour to everybody.

[mashakos]

2) Nobody has, so far, dismissed the importance of space when watercooling is concerned, as it has not been brought up in the discussion so far

I have been discussing the importance of space for the past 3 pages!
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/foru...l=1#post240396

It's just that gundato and nalano have trouble grasping the concepts, so they fall back on bringing up Dell PCs.

EDIT: So nobody gets confused:-
Watercooling kit in big ass case = eezy peezy
watercooling kit in tiny case = super hard

[Drake Sigar]

Keep talking. So many people in this thread are looking at you like this:

[Grizzly]

I have been discussing the importance of space for the past 3 pages!
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/foru...l=1#post240396

It's just that gundato and nalano have trouble grasping the concepts, so they fall back on bringing up Dell PCs.

EDIT: So nobody gets confused:-
Watercooling kit in big ass case = eezy peezy
watercooling kit in tiny case = super hard

Geuss what. You never mentioned anything about space after that post (and even in that post, you did not stress that that was important to you). You only mentioned "more complicated", and the potential pitfalls of a water cooling kit, and never again mentioned tight spaces. Have you considered that the radio reception is also affected by the signal quality of the source?

Also - why the fuck do you need water cooling?