The Underscore Archives

On Sun, Feb 03, 2008 at 01:03:50PM +0000, Richard Davey wrote:
> Hi Steve,
> 
> Sunday, February 3, 2008, 12:39:48 PM, you wrote:
> 
> > Maybe the purchased complete PC will go slower but lets assume it
> > takes a couple of days to spec and build a machine that's going to
> 
> A couple of days? What are you putting together - a Cray?! :)
> 
> More like a couple of hours, or possibly an evening, tops.

Really, generally I have to spend a few hours researching what
components to buy (e.g. I was thinking of an SN10000 and it
takes a bit of effort to figure out which is best).

Then you've got to spend a while ordering components, unless you buy
only from one outfit, still it's more than 20 minutes, then it all
arrives (spending time to stay in again), then I have to build the
thing and if it was to run Windows or something I'd then have to spend
another couple of hours installing it.

Realistically at the very fastest it's going to take half a days worth
of time and in order to get the actual real improvment of having
everything matched and specced perfectly would take at least a day of
time.

Contrast that to spending a day of time speccing up someone elses cray
and put your earnings into some crazy PC built by some custom pc
builders somewhere perhaps ? Well, that's my thinking, but I'm still
looking at these fanless via things now.

Damn... I just can't see it being as profitable, even performance
wise, as compared to doing some techie work for the same amount of
time!

I think the same is probably true of most techies, but I guess having
fun building things takes priority over work for me at least. ;)

        Steve