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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   4607 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 20, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Building consumer desktops is more tedious and time consuming than it is a tremendous headache. If you can't figure out how to put together silicon LEGO then you're the perfect market for the local computer shop's services. They're not seedy but they are more or less charging an idiot tax. If your ego or wallet can't handle paying that then spend a few hours on /r/buildapc to figure it out.

Also it doesn't even sound like you have any reason to upgrade. Is any game you're playing not running at smooth 60fps?

Some CPU cooling systems really are a pain to mount.

That's why you watch a video review of the cooler you want to buy to see how much of a PitA it is to mount.

I bought one, took great pains to mount it and now I can't get it off. :S

Please, there may be children reading this.

Eh, idiot taxes are charged to everything. I don't think the world is better off if everyone changed their own oil, raised their own chicken, filed paper taxes, or drafted divorce paperwork.

I think my interest in upgrading the CPU is not dissimilar to people who buy the latest iPhone Pro Max Supreme every year. No one really needs that camera upgrade, but it's nice. And the out of pocket cost isn't too different either. To answer your question, there are a few applications that noticeably chugs due to CPU limitations. RimWorld (in late game) is one, and Excel (large data sets) another.

My RimWorld doubled in TPS going from a Ryzen 1700 to a 5600x. That felt nice, it meant I could play a single save game for like 30 hours before it became unbearably slow as opposed to 15 hours haha.

This is exactly what I'm talking about! I wish they had multithreading but people say that'd require the code be rewritten from scratch, so only recourse is to brute force it with better hardware.

Specialization is of course good, but all the things you've listed (except changing oil) are much more complicated and take longer to learn than building a PC.

If you're so rich that you can call it a convenience tax rather than an idiot tax, then sure call it that instead. But if your time really is that valuable one wonders why you asked here in the first place.

Eh, Elon Musk still shitposts all day when his time is worth like a million an hour (if you divide his 189B net worth by the number of hours in 33 years between his age and when he turned 18, you get 0.65m per hour). I think we mortals should be allowed to complain about complexity even if we can afford to have a pro take care of it.

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