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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   4011 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 27, 2023

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Always grateful I buy prebuilt from Dell for expensive gaming PCs. Every four years I go to the Alienware website, get whatever the moderately good spec is (-80/i7 tier rather than -90/i9 tier), and pay the extra $200 for four years of whatever the ultra-premium Dell Support tier is. I also call them and haggle on the phone and can usually get the price down to the cost of parts on popular PC-parts websites, actually last time it was even cheaper because all the parts store were price-gouging on the 3080. So all I'm paying extra for is the warranty.

Whenever there's an issue, they're at my place the same or next day with a truck full of parts (including even replacement motherboards), I let the guy into my office room, go do something else, an hour or two later it's fixed. No endless diagnosis, no scouring hardware forums, no mountain of Indian youtube videos, trawling error messages, trying to resit my RAM, fiddling with the BIOS, downloading furmark, downloading and running memory testing software etc. Most importantly, absolutely zero RMA-ing. GPU fails? He puts a new one in, done, no waiting a month or whatever. The one time the whole PC was apparently FUBAR I got a new one a few days later. Apparently you can even use it abroad so if you move or buy one of their laptops they'll come to your hotel or holiday home and fix it there too.

You may be an exception given your comments on what Indian doctors get paid, but certainly for the average Western PMC unless you enjoy tinkering or building your own PC I can't see a major reason not just to buy the Dell because the hours you spend fixing it (even if breaks down only very occasionally) aren't worth it financially. 100% piece of mind and I never have to think about the Bios ever again.

I think you’re doing the right thing. I poured more time than I wanted to into PC assembly, troubleshooting etc. Too paranoid to let others handle it though.

  1. Why is your PC breaking down that much? I built mine in 2019 and its broken down only once. It also took a transatlantic flight.

  2. You lose a lot of modularity with a prebuilt as restrictive as dells. The last time I checked they use all kinds of proprietary shit, if you build you can replace/upgrade much easier.

  3. No one but the most ardent of overclockers think about the bios even once aftee they navigate the boot drive with it once. You are making the process of building a PC sound like rocket science.

I've built a PC with my dad before, have bought a couple of prebuilts from other brands, my partner built a PC, and I have bought the Alienwares and they all seem to have 'significant' issues every 2-3 years or so. It just feels like a gaming PC thing, although I've had issues with Macs too. Random bluescreens, fans suddenly failing, GPUs artifacting/going faulty after a few months, a water cooler failed, a stick of ram was faulty, whatever.

You lose a lot of modularity with a prebuilt as restrictive as dells. The last time I checked they use all kinds of proprietary shit, if you build you can replace/upgrade much easier.

Sure, but the proprietary shit doesn't matter. At a time when 3080s were selling for 3x MSRP and an RMA took/takes 2 months for most manufacturers, I got a new card the next day after mine got bricked. That's a unique level of service.

But why are your things breaking so often??

I've built well over 20 PC's in the last few years for friends, families and small businesses. It is not nearly as common as its been for you.

PC gaming is the worst form of gaming, except for all the others.

I'm glad to hear you've got a good experience from a name brand, in the future I might not need to pinch pennies and just buy a good pre-built. I'm not overly enamoured by the PC building process, but I do have plenty of parts that might last me a while, so I'm not leaving yet.

In India at the least, I've never heard of any company providing such excellent customer service, but then again PC gaming is a rarety here since we've steadily been priced out of the market. My RTX 3070 was the equivalent of 1.5x my current monthly salary, to put it in perspective. We pay 50% more for comparable electronics on 1/5th the salary compared to the West, which is many Indians resemble a walking Microcenter after a US vacation as they bring as much can fit back home for their friends and family.

My RTX 3070 was the equivalent of 1.5x my current monthly salary

In what unholy universe can one justify spending 1.5x one's salary on a GPU...

With 1.5x my salary I could buy a... used Ford Mustang (currently debating whether to save for a rainy day or blow it all on a Corvette). But I would still flinch when buying a 3070. In fact I won't. My 1070 serves me fine.

Do you just.. not think about the future or retirement or are you just that bullish on AI doom or have an extensive support network? I literally cannot fathom spending that much on a GPU!

Uh, that's more an indictment of my salary being shit than anything else, why do you think I intend to emigrate?

This was in the middle of the pandemic, and I paid 90k INR for that, or about a thousand USD today. In fact, it might have been two months salary at the time, my current job is about a 50% payraise, but after 2 years, so who knows how much inflation ate up.

A Mustang is 90,000 USD equivalent here (!), or about 12-15 years of my current salary lmao, maybe a year or two for my dad, at the peak of his career. Shit is expensive, and we earn less, what do about it?

When you make such a pittance, you have little incentive to save any of it. If I'm making 5 or 6 times more abroad (at a minimum), then the paltry sum I could save here isn't worth the inability to indulge in my only expensive hobby. But yes, I have plenty of familial support right now, so I don't have to worry about that cash not going to rent, fuel or other expenses. That'll change when I'm out of the country of course.

I actually don't care in the least about retiring, at least not voluntarily. I'm not kidding about my AI timelines, if I'm cost competitive with AGI in 10 years I'll eat my hat. To the extent that I want more money and more savings, it's because money can buy security and safety, I'd rather become unemployed with a hundred k in the bank than when I'm broke!

Okay, I think I underestimated a new Mustangs cost, I'm not anywhere near making 60k USD a month. But that was the most absurd comparison that came to mind, albeit a heavily used Mustang. But eh.

Just don't go crazy when you emigrate and end up with not paltry amounts of money on tap on a monthly basis. Hit yourself in the head with a frying pan and tell yourself "This is not India, COL is higher here, and I don't have parents to support me here" because you might feel like a newly minted millionaire as you do a quick currency conversion in your head.

I'll keep that in mind, but gaming and takeout aside, I'm quite frugal, and the former is unlikely to be a proportionally equivalent expense in the West!

Side note, I saw you liked my recommendation about Outer Wilds and Disco Elysium. Any other game recommendations you think are in a similar tier?

For a shorter Outer Wildsesque experience, try The Forgotten City. It has a similar gameplay loop as TOW and you should go in blind.

Looking at it's price I'd consider putting it on the Steam wishlist and waiting for it to go on sale to 50% or so (I have 12 hours playtime in it compared to 45hrs for TOW). Overall, not as good as The Outer Wilds, but then, what is?

I have played that one! It was pretty good, honestly the ending was a bit of a letdown for me. Didn't feel like it was a very tight plot point. But damn I had so much fun playing through it, the one sequence that's... a bit gruesome was incredible.

If we're talking time-loop story games, I'm going to throw in a recommendation for Elsinore. I did enjoy The Forgotten City, too, although both have the problem that unlike Outer Wilds, the explanation for the time loop just feels like bad writing. Although that felt worse in The Forgotten City because that was the end of the game and it felt unsatisfying.

Only Red Dead 2. I had an emotional reaction to Prince of Persia 2008 but the DLC that provides the true ending is inaccessible because it was only released on console and iirc isn't downloadable anymore.

Is it the one with black goop? Loved it, found it fun how people complained about it being too easy even though the mechanic was functionally just a prettier autosave.

Yeah it was. I don’t mind the autosave system, it makes platforming smoother than Uncharted etc (which as you note have the same system). The casting was great, though, Nolan North is such a hit and miss actor but him and Kari Wahlgren have excellent chemistry.

Ugh console and DRM games are the worst. Thanks for the recommendation for Red Dead 2, I kind of forgot about it but it did have a ton of buzz when it came out. It's on my wishlist.

I tried RDR2, enjoyed the game play, but realized i hated an awful lot of the characters (not in terms of bad writing, but as people). Tempted every now and again to fire it up and go bird watching, but I really wish there was some in-game way to learn about where a breed of horse/critter hangs out.

The animals are usually sketched on the map if you’re looking for where they’re most often found. Birds might be harder though.

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