Yup, it's nucking futs. GTX 460 was £120 at launch and saved Nvidia and the clarkdake I3 was what? £60? Wait no, the star of the show was the clarkdale pentium and was £59 and you could overclock it. Board was a gigabyte h55n, £55. Add 4gb ram and you were good to go. Bugger me 'wid fishfork things have changed...
We need 1 and 2 GB sticks to come back, as well as single core CPUs. Soon, the cheapest pre-built systems are going to come with a whopping 512MB, 'cause 512 much moar than 8 or 16. The sales will go through the roof! This is the thing that's going to reinvigorate the PC industry, I tell you, and we'll see double-digit annual growth again. Fret not, these big chip producers always had our best interests in mind and are bringing innovation back to PC.
Now now, that's wrong by nearly a factor of two! You can see on this very site: https://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphics/2010/07/12/nvidia-geforce-gtx-460-graphics-card-review/1
That's the 1gb not the 768. I'm telling you that the 768 was £120. I know, my mate bought three of them for folding. And like usual the 1gb wasn't worth having.
A £110 Z170 board isn't exactly "scraping the barrel", and obviously pointless for a locked chip. Also, the opening quote from the GTX460 review above is quite funny - now we know how drastically the situation reversed:
Nvidia were bang in the doodoo back then. 460 saved their asses. They were in so much trouble they even made their own 460s for Best Buy and Circuit City (cut out the middle man for more coin). Let's also face it, it was at a higher level than the 1050Ti too. £120 got you about the same level of performance as a 1060. Low end it certainly was not.
The problem is that even a barebones board like that with just about everything imaginable stripped from it costs over £100. Of course I may well have chosen those particular parts to illustrate a point about just how little you would get for the money and just to be clear, I would never recommend to anyone to buy that particular config as that far down the ladder you are far better off going for used parts anyway.
But you could get a H110 mATX board for £50 and it would be just as useful as your Z170 board at twice the price.
Which very nicely illustrates my point about hardware being too expensive, there is no justification for the £100+ pricetag.
Nice, I picked up DDR3 1866 2x8GB kit in China a couple of months ago for around £40. I figure now is a good time to put the DDR3 1600 2x4GB its replacing on ebay.
New low end hardware = Piss poor value for the money these days. Companies are trying to screw us by creating even worse value "premium" low end products. £100+ for an ultra low end board is a very very bad joke by the manufacturer.
Sure, but you could just get a low end board for £50 instead. I agree that "premium" low end boards are poor value but that doesn't mean that low end hardware = piss poor value for money. Just seems like you're conflating two different things there.
I agree on processors (why people stood for this -K version nonsense I'll never understand), motherboards and memory, but the RX 470/480 and GTX 1060 are I think comfortably the most impressive mid-range cards - grunt, efficiency and value - released since I started down the hardware path (GTX 460 era). I thought I was happy with my £155 RX 480, but I think your friend got a monster deal on those 460s.
I'm pretty sure it was OCUK. Within about two weeks of the 460 launch a Palit and some Inno3D came up for around £120. The Palit was as ugly as sin but the INNO were just the stock fan type. So he bought three and used two in SLi and the other when he was folding. http://valid.canardpc.com/show_oc.php?id=1341569 There you go haha he never did update his CPUID in his sig
