I love it when you deviate from all that tech jazz and lay it down, its good to hear someone as respected as you give us some raw material! But I gotta say Graham, this comment about pricing surprises me a little, especially coming from you. Surely you of all people know that all hardware quickly becomes yesterday's news and prices change drastically, especially after 6 months. Half a year is an eternity in this business.
Which is why I always buy second best. 90% of the performance of the top dog, but far less expensive.
Basically it comes down to different strokes for different folks. My criteria for buying hardware and the time I invest into getting it working is really only applicable to me - it's why I never denigrate another's choices in hardware, or try to talk them out of a purchase if they have their mind made up.
Looking solely from a gaming/benching perspective, there are a group of people out there who simply must have the latest benchmark queen on Day One. What is there to recommend the purchase? Inflated prices, generally reference only design, immature drivers, early adopter guinea pigs for software beta testing and hardware fault finding ? On the face of it, except for the e-peen value there is little to recommend the purchase....except that one thing that defines "enthusiast".
The enthusiast lives for the next big thing. Tinkering, fine tuning, modding, hacking, time, and resources required to produce the end result becomes its own validation. It is why the buyer of a prebuilt Maingear watercooled, quad GPU system is seen as something vastly less than the person who builds the same machine from parts.
Most of the people who come to me for system building/upgrades have entire systems that cost less than my graphics card- I'm sure they view me as mentally unhinged for pouring money into parts that depreciate as soon as I open the box they arrive in. Every person has a cut-off point where they simply can't justify the cash outlay to themselves; the $500 system buyer sees the $1000-1500 system as frivolous. Likewise, with the $1-1.5K system buyer viewing a $3K build, and the $3K system buyer can't justify the price or work required for phase change cooling or hardmodded graphics. The difference with the enthusiast is that they don't try to justify the price, need to justify the time, or care that much about the achievement once it is reached. New parts are now on the horizon, and a new journey to the next achievement awaits. The component cost is simply the price of admission for some people.
In the end it doesn't matter if you're talking about some guy with a compulsion to brag about their latest shiny thing with a GPU-Z validation, or someone frankensteining Titans to deliver more power and blowing up a few thousand dollars worth of hardware. The top parts sell and drive the entire product line (and the reason that people get locked into upgrade cycles) particularly second-tier parts with the reflected glory and kinship with the halo parts. There's also a reason that mainstream cards don't supply the bulk of reviews and forum wars even though they represent the vast majority of sales.
