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Hi
having been viewing the threads, i wondered how much you lot spend and how often on your pc bits.
do you all upgrade immediately when a new product comes along, do you all get it trade price so you can afford to upgrade a lot, or just bang it on mr credit card
probably an annoying noisy q, but just wondered.
my spend is a little over £300 in 2 years, that was athlon mobo and processor for £140 and now a core 2 duo and mobo for £150.
Happy Christmas everybody!
£1200~ this year. Only because I keep breaking bits, like a laptop. I dont use credit for stuff like this, its hardly justifyable.
I've spent probably 2k over the last 4 or 5 years, excluding the purchase of my laptop (£941 in one go :()
I probably won't do much on the upgrade front until I leave uni, as I'm not using my desktop PC much.
Dave
Not enough! Damn me for being a good saver...
A couple of years back I was spending ~2K on my rigs yearly. When you pop £320 on a graphics card, it doesn’t go far. It honestly became an obsession.
However, ive sworn that off a while back. My main rig is an overclocked opty, which does me nicely. I have a c2d waiting for my next upgrade, but im refusing to do that until RAM drops. Ive 2 gig on this machine, my next one will have at least 4, otherwise there is little point me upgrading.
Id say I do 2 major component upgrades a year now, but I usually sell the old stuff off on ebay which pays for most of it. Ive also dropped my number of PC’s from around 10 to 3 over the last 2 years (im excluding the clasics here like my spectrums, RISC-OS machines, BBC’s ect :D). Around 20gighz of networked processing power was great for 3d max renders, but other than that, it was little use and used more elecy than I should really be spending on.
At the moment, real life is taking a grasp of things so I have zero PC spending money. I forced myself to get into debt (interest free though) and buy a motorbike, so I didn’t keep wasting my money on PC bits I don’t really need. Now all my bike lessons are almost over, ill be taking the same route and getting my car driving sorted.
Im also hoping to go to Ibiza twice next year, so I need to save for that too! :)
I'll max my system out as far as the motherboard will go before I buy a new one. My current system started out with a radeon 8500, athlon xp1500 palamino! and 512megs RAM. Ive since maxed the motherboard out as far as it will go realistically.. 6800GS, XP-3000 Barton, 1GB Ram - granted this can be upped but in terms of speed PC3200 is right for my system. Having said that I have bought a new monitor, keyboard and case within the last year and a mouse in the last 2 years so I'll probably be using them on the new system I plan on building next spring (waiting for bearlake) which I hope to spend less than 1200 quid on. I can't wait :)
Ibiza twice, owns 10 PCs and a motorbike. Ade is the hardcoreestestest on the forums. :pQuote:
Originally Posted by Agent
I've not spent anything on it in months now, but this year has been quite expensive. Was barely into January when I got my Dell 24" monitor and have upgraded my entire computer gradually over the year. Everything except the monitor, case(s) and CPU have been bought second hand from this site or another tech one. Roughly £1400 all in there. Probably going to be well into the second half of 2007 before I do any major upgrades, can't really fault my PC at the moment. That said I am about to drop a couple of hundred on them there Logitech Z5500 speakers, most of that money is from a Xmas present, though.
Far too much! Usually about £750 a year and another £1250 every 4/5 years when I completely rebuild.
pr0p
baught my complete system for £800 2 years ago, simply because it said "amd 64" on the front lol
since then ive spent around £300 on ram/gfx card shiny bubbles etc :D
I dont spend much nowadays - I only upgrade when it's really becoming a bit of joke (every 3 years?) and even then Im more than happy to just go for 2nd hand bits that arent quite up to latest speed.
The only thing I bought new for my current computer is the case (which actually cost the most), and the DVD-RW drive. In the past year Ive bought a GFX card coz the old one stopped working and smelled of burning, although Ivejust ordered a new DVD burner because this ones just stopped working (POC). Big spender I am ;-) Im not into how my machine looks either - I mix and match beige and black stuff - and any light gadgetry is a big no no for me.
I don't really play that many games anymore, so my requirement is not so much - although I am doing 3D studio max next semester, which should err....be fun on my current machine. My computer has recently been overheating just running Firefox!
I'd love to build a new completely fangdangled top of the range PC one day, but money dictates a big no no. :(
When I wanted to build new one, I try keep cost to £250 in the past and using older parts that were in good working order in new system.
I've spent around £120 a year tops for past 3 years...but these were to replace parts that near end of life or stopped working.
Problem is my next build if I go that way again will have new pci-e format, fsb has improved and things have been shifted to 64 bit. May just have to go through pc company.
My next investment will probably be in a cheap second hand 939 board- and delegate the fileserving duties to my current socket A desktop. Probably along the lines of ASRock Dual SATA and a 3800+ Dual Core if they can be had for the right price :)
Dave
About 2.5p per hour that I get from it before I upgrade.
Which makes it seem like not alot.
That's 2.5p per hour of actual use (i.e. sitting here using it).
I don't upgrade very often, and when I do it's never the latest top of the range thing.
I've probably spent around £500 in the past 2 years doing a complete overhaul of my old sempron machine.
The Core2Duos tempted me to an upgrade but I've gotta be sensible :p
I used to spend about £400 a year maintaining my system, but it hasn't been upgraded for about 2 years except a backup hard drive and a memory upgrade about a year ago.
Might do it again soon, but everything has moved on so fast that I'd have to do heaploads of research!
Also, I'll never buy something as soon as it comes out... Wait till the next "Big launch" then get the same bits cheaper! :D
I've gone from:
AthlonXP 1700+, Radeon 9200SE and 768MiB of RAM
to
AthlonXP3000+, 6600GT, 1GiB of RAM
all for £46! (Although, I'll have to spend another £40 for a new PSU)
Bought the GFx card, got given the RAM and CPU, i'm an alright scrounger, still..theres always room for another upgrade...namley, a HD to replace my dying 80Gb one I have atm!
I spent £3,200 earlier in the year. The bulk of that though was on a Dell 30" monitor. I tend to sell my gear on before it becomes redundant so normally every 12 months. So in march I'll probably sell the £2,000 of PC for about £1,700 to an unsuspecting family member or friend and then spend another £2,000 on a new PC.
Every time I do a big spend though, I have the best PC for about 2 days before some releases the next big thing!
too much :/
at the moment i'm concentrating on making a decent raid3 setup using 5x400gb drives to keep a solid backup of my stuff
Far too much .
The systems at work show the following for my sales account
This Mth 73.44
YTD 736.24
Last Yr 5410.45
:(
£1100~ About 4 years ago, not changed anything, apart from get a couple of fans, and a zalman copper cooler for the gfx card, but those were "presents" XD
Im going to be spending £800-900 on a new pc soon though @_@
burned my way through about 5-6 grand since january 2005 :)
Spent £1k on a laptop two years ago and then another £300 on bits for it last year,... now another £1k on a pc, but my lappie is still going strong so i'll probably just spend little bits on upgrading the pc in a year or so (new HDD, maybe new GFX in a years time)
If you can budget and have a decent credit rating, get one of those 0% on purchases till Oct 2007 or whatever credit cards and put it on that, then you can pay it off as you like and not pay any interest :D
in the last year? £100. last 3? £500 or so?
and you lot say consoles are too expensive :o
i used to spend geekish amounts on stuff, but nowerdays i'd much rather spend my money on going out with my mates, having drinks, travelling, holidays and things like that. how many nights in playing with yer computer will you remember in 10 years time?
About 2k since September on this new pc...before that nothing for 5 years, my 1.8ghz P4 did me until I got this one, and I didn't know enough about PC's to upgrade anyway.
Original build and upgrades since Dec 1998 : £6785 ish.
I've also specced/bought about 18 Dell lappys and PCs for family and friends since 2001. A lot of dosh !
I try and keep it under a grand a year. Probably going to a do a vista build as soon as none EE Core 2 quads/a decent AMD quad core comes out. That'll probably make my wallet sting.
My new one will cost 900pounds which is a lot for me, but it should be good
Average about £500 per year
not enough, thats what you get from not being old enough to work fully. I am saving up for a new PC mind you, still will only be £600-£700. Will be upgrading over the next year though, or add on rather then upgrade.
net position is £500 over 2 years
I don't think that is too bad and I certainly won't be upgrading for some while, I never buy at the peak releases
I just spent £550 on a entirely new PC, but I managed to sell my 3 year old one (which I bought for £800) for £300, so I only really spent £250, but I spend £200 on a new screen a few months back, but I put the price of my old 17" screen against that. I probably spend about £200 a year, I would spend more however if I felt I could afford it.
i spent about £300-£400 on an AMD Athlon 64 system in march
Then about 3/4 weeks ago, forked out £1000 on a brand new core2duo system, which has basically broken the bank, only thing letting my comp down now though is my GFX card (ATI Radeon X1800GTO)
is that with staff discount :mrgreen:Quote:
Originally Posted by Carlh
Just spent about £1150 on full core 2 duo system with G8800 GTS 2GB Corsair Dominator memory 19" NEC Screen etc. Love it probably upgrade again in March knowing me LOL :lol:
My GFX card (Radeon 9800 pro) is from about september 2003 and cost me £180 all in - they were going for £250 at the time but i got it through a developer mate that used some deal his employer had with ATI to get one for me and one for him.
The rest of my rig was bought in february 2004 and cost circa £600. 1GB ram , A64 3000+ 160GB SATA HDD
May 2005 I spent another £120 ish on a much better PSU, another 160GB HDD and a Zalman CPS7000 cooler - it dropped CPU temps by 10 degrees!
mid 2006 I upgraded the 1GB DDR500 RAM that never saw more than 420 MHz to 2GB of Corsair DDR400 valueRAM and have never regretted it. About £120.
So a bit over £1000 in 3 years and I have maintained a system thats "fast enough" for any game for £340 ish per year. Not bad methinks :)
Its getting completely replaced in the coming feb though.
mmm I dont upgrade that much but probably in the region of of £200 a year
well i've spent £500 this year :) and that means £500 is total ive spent in my life, as thats the first PC ive owned outright.
looking to spent around £300 over the next year on new RAM or a GFX card....maybe a TV card aswell.
about £1800 every year depending if i can save money or not
500-1000 per year roughly. Been a fairly lean year this year though due to other expenses.
Belive it :DQuote:
Originally Posted by Stewart
Its 4 times if you count the last 2 visits ;)
Although now i know a few people on the island, i might try to blag me a job over there and stay for the summer next year :)
I've spent about £300 in the last 5 years or so. I only tend to upgrade when I can't run things I like running anymore.
now increased to £250 and another £100 on new ram.
need to shift my old stuff....
Nowadays less and less. As you get older you realise that there's something called a mortgage so I usually spend more money on a display to make the interface nice rather than the actual system itself. My system is decent enough to play CSS at maximum settings at 1680x1050 and I haven't upgraded it for about 7-8 months so I can't complain :)
prolly between 350 and 800 a year depending if its a refresh or a redo year
A shade over £2000 this year for my core2duo build, have been buying bits and bobs for the past 5 months though.
It will be about £900 from the componants I have already bought and those I will be buying combined :) Bare in mind that I am starting from scratch
aother £90 in ram 2 mths ago, wish i'd waited :(
Add another £25.. joypad had to get replaced so I could stay sane :mrgreen:
first go i spent £1000+ but now i\'ve got a screen and hdd\'s its less each year upgrading little bits. but this year it will be another big upgrade to am2 when the new ones come out.
I change system about every 5 years, when the CPU/socket/motherboard/ram combination really can\'t hack it anymore, and then it\'s for the cheapest \'good\' new system of the time, usually around 600 quid. Then it\'s just GPU upgrades every 1-2 years.
about 800-900 quid every3 years. i always swear ill spend a bomb and get something top of the range but always end up with something fairly average that does the job
Re-build every 2 years for around 500-700, am about to build new - spend was approx £600 not including screen and cd-drive & s/card
Only thing I\'ve done in recent times is stick a new 500GB hdd in... I keep saying I\'ll build a new C2D-based machine but then think to myself, hmmm save money for a new car or pc..
last year it was around 1300 for me, but that did include my 24" monitor... i tend to always buy the out of date things too! all i really look for now is if it can play the few online games i play and more importantly, if everything is stable.
As little as possible for me. Possibly every two and a half to three yr now for an upgrade.
Recently spent about £240 on processor / board / graphics card and case. Previously when I upgraded I done just the graphics card and that was the 6600GT AGP shortly after it was released.
Hopefully will get another 2 yr from what I have now. Get as much from it as possible always. When I start having probs running new stuff I revisit older games and play through them until I can afford an upgrade.
I\'m about to spend about £1200 on a new rig but that should last me at least three to four years.
probably spent about £1500+ complete new build, new monitor, speakers e.t.c. so far this year :P
I suprise myself how much i spend cos im a student...
I probably spend ~£200 a year on desktop, which I bought 2.5 years ago... cost about £1200 then, but everything in that has actually changed except the case, lol
Then last october I stupidly bought a tablet pc which i don\'t use at all...waste of £1250 :(
Its better if students dont get more money, if they do then they will just waste it all.
I'm exactly the same. Tbh it kinda scares me how much I've been able to spend on my PCs. I think I've spent about 2-2 1/2 thousand over the past 2 years.Quote:
Originally Posted by SiM
What are yo planning to buy to make it last 4 years?Quote:
Originally Posted by simonfitba
At least you have a good system to show after spending that much...Quote:
Originally Posted by doddsy
Maybe he is going to buy a £500 pc and £700 of scan gift vouchers :pQuote:
Originally Posted by poindextermatic
I hate to think what I spent last year - this year its £350- so far (2 xbox 360 controllers, new case DVD writer & PSU & more Ram) should get a little bit back selling some of the old bits on ebay though.
around £600 but then I upgrade it with £200+ of parts e.g. larger HDD and ram, oh and additional gadgets e.g. fan controllers, fans etc......
I don't like upgrading, when I feel my technology is deemed as 'ancient technology' I just swap out the whole system and research the hell out all the components, before I buy.
the computer market is soo big, that inflation has a little of a knock on it, and the vast arrary of competition means I get alot more for my money in terms of the hardware and it's immeditate performance, the rig on the left cost me a whopping £700 and I'm not happy that i'm the only one with a single core these days :(
Quote:
Originally Posted by d19z
HAHA no you're not... I'm still running my TBred from 5 (ish) years ago.
My pc is due for a complete overhaul but I used to spend about £500 a year on it.
theres not many of our kind remaning, we must combine our unity :PQuote:
Originally Posted by tiggerai
Geforce4 OUCH! I see why you have such a big post count :P
It still does what it needs to... I'm not a gamer (yet) or a graphic artist, so as long as it can run Dreamweaver and Photoshop and a browser don't need it to be the best it can be. Once i've got my jaunts around the country done, PC upgrade will be next, and this one will become a webserver (finally)
I have a big post count because I'm old Skool HEXUS, been here years now.
Hope you're enjoying your stay! (you'll never leave!)
I would say I send about £500 per year on PC upgrades
How much I spend has varied a lot over the years. My first proper PC was just short of £10,000 (yeah, ten grand), but that was in the days when a 338MB was £1500 (and yes, I did mean Megabyte).
But then, for the last couple of years, my expenditure has been £0 per year.
I've had a few doodads in recent months (about £200 worth) and am about (when I finally get time) to upgrade one system, and it'll cost me about £1500-ish.
I wouldn't like to put a figure on an annual expenditure. It fluctuates too broadly.
wel i still have a pentium 4 northwood under my hood but recently bought a agp geforce 7800GS +
I can't be bothered much with PC's anymore, there is always something so much better round the corner. I got my current system in 'My System' back when athlon 64's first came out out. Big mistake due to how 939 came out shortly after. £150 on the CPU, £130 on the motherboard, £130 on the ram, £60 on power supply and about £500 spent on various different graphic cards. I haven't upgraded it (bar the graphics cards since it was built) because it does what I need it to very nicely, MSN & the web, the odd game and music :) I might go core 2 duo or quad core eventually but the way I see it, the longer I hold off the better to be honest :)
:surprised:Quote:
Originally Posted by Saracen
i take it that was rather more specialised than most peoples comps at the time?Quote:
Originally Posted by Saracen
about £1300 over the last year. too much tbh since i have only £10 in the bank after the phone bill goes out
Toooooooooooo much, my last build was just a little over £500
700 in the last 6 months....not spending a large amount on PC's though for a while now
Well, this was fairly early in the evolution of PCs and nothing was cheap. But I suspect that it wasn't that unusual in relation to what other people buying PCs were buying - it's just that it was far from a mass sport at the time. Not all that many private people had computers at all, and PCs were almost exclusively the reserve of business buyers.Quote:
Originally Posted by MadduckUK
Don't forget that technology has moved on a LOT in a very short space of time, and that the era I'm talking about (approximately '83 or '84-ish) was when mobile phones cost >£3,000 for anything, and were briefcase-sized "luggables". They doubled up as a weight-training system. :D
From memory :-
- 386/25 CPU
- 4MB RAM
- 338MB ESDI hard drive
- 150MB tape streamer
- SVGA card
- 15" monitor
I'd dabbled with other machines before this, but that was the first fully-specified system purchase.
But, a previous Apple IIe had cost £1000 (all bar small change) in ....erm ..... 1979 IIRC, and that was close to a basic machine. It did have a 5.25" floppy drive (at about £300 for a drive taking 140k-ish diskettes :eek:), whereas most machines just used a cassette tape for data load and storage. But there was a 'modulator' that drove a TV screen rather than a monitor, and as for hard drives .... well, not on a PC in those days. And at that time, Sinclair even launched the ZX80. Tandy had the TRS-80 (I had one of them too) and there was also the Commodore PET.
Then I bought the shell of a Dell (a VERY early '286). This was basically just a box, motherboard, memory and processor, floppy drive and keyboard. That was, if memory serves, about £1500. A Video 7 Vega VGA board added nearly £300, and a 14" NEC Multisync monitor added nearly £500 on it's own. The 1MB of RAM was a luxury, because at that time, some visionary in IBM had given the opinion that nobody would ever need more than 640KB of memory. :rolleyes:
And you wouldn't believe the shenanigans we had trying to shoehorn drivers and stuff into the gaps in the 384KB between the 640KB mark and the 1MB the machine actually had .... in-between the bits reserved for system use. Get that shoehorning wrong and you had a system crash. Ahhh, the good ol' days of the QEMM memory manger utility.
You have to watch it, Madduck .... you'll set me off on even more of a (boring, I'm sure) nostalgia kick.
But in answer to your question, :-
1) ANY form of computer in a home was relatively unusual
2) A PC at home was close to unheard of (the price hints at why ;))
3) In relation to most PCs, it may have been fairly high-end, but "specialised"? No, not really.
Makes you realise how far things have moved, doesn't it? :D
Oh, and while we're on about prices .... :-
- an early Creative Labs Soundblaster card £270.
- an NEC 3x CD player (player, not burner) at £300.
- a Yamaha CDR-100 CD burner £4000
- disks for that Yamaha burner £15 EACH - at wholesale, not retail, prices.
I will admit that the Yamaha burner was actually only £2500. But the software you needed to drive it (Personal Scribe) was £1500, and you needed it because there was naff-all else to drive it, so it was a £4000 (well, £3,995 according to the invoice, 'cos I just checked it). And it was an old DOS app that was clunky as hell.
Oh, and you needed special hard drives (AV-rated) because even standard SCSI drives tended to have build-in TCAL (thermal calibration) routines that would turn one of those CD blanks into a coaster if it did it mid-burn (and that was close to an hour, none of this 52x stuff then). And at £15 a time, you didn't really want to take several attempts at getting a disk to work. ;)
The shocking thing, though, is that that CD burner was £4000 in the mid-90s. I'm not talking pre-Ark this time, but just 12 or 13 years ago.
You're making me feel young :embarrassed:Quote:
Originally Posted by Saracen
I just found out an old 20Mb HD - Its pre-IDE!
I know its RISC-OS formatted. Wonder what's on there.
MFM, probably. Then they brought out "larger" RLL drives, which basically were the old 20MB MFM drives, encoded differently using the Run Length Limited technique. As I'm sure you know. :DQuote:
Originally Posted by Agent
I think I'll still got a few of those in a cupboard somewhere. I know I still have that £1500 338MB drive. It's a full-height drive and I use it as a door-stop. :embarrassed: :D
I think you may be right :DQuote:
Originally Posted by Saracen
Its got 2 ribbon cables going to the drive, so most likely MFM?
Going to be honest though, this drive is from before my time. It was something I used to have in a RISC-OS machine when I was a kid.
Perhaps we should start a vintage thread with pics of our old-school parts and machines :mrgreen: