How Not to Suggest PC Components.

So it strikes me, there are a lot of people who manage to do bad jobs of suggesting components, from "reviewers" to forumgoers, and everywhere in between. The reasons are usually obvious if you already know the product is bad or inappropriate for you, or if you can read between the lines well, but what if you can't? You might end up wasting money, without even knowing it.

So what are the reasons for bad suggestions? I generally list ignorance, fanboyism, fantasy building, malice, and feeling honor bound to suggest certain components. Ignorance is fairly obvious. Sometimes people just don't know what they're talking about, whether it's outdated information, or something anecdotal they took on faith. Not much needs to be said about this, beyond two major factors: be willing to admit you were wrong, and try not to be ignorant.

Fanboyism, however, due to its close similarity to brand loyalty, deserves some discussion and definition. What is fanboyism? Fanboyism is when brand loyalty gets taken to an extreme, beyond reason, causing prejudice and inaccurate suggestions and belief in the face of evidence. Brand loyalty, however, is preferential treatment for a brand based on personal reasons, and usually doesn't come out in suggestions as a strong biased arguing point. Example being: I've got brand loyalty to EVGA. Awesome customer support, excellent warranty, and most of their products are well thought out, and designed in a way that's beneficial to my use. I'm not going to suggest them to someone that doesn't need those things, though, and, since their new motherboard team isn't quite up to my standard for EVGA, I wouldn't suggest their motherboards right now.

Fantasy building is what I call it when people try to get someone else to build the PC they wish they could build. This will come out in suggestions of multi-GPU, flagship motherboards, and top-end CPUs for people who would be perfectly happy with less, and not even use it in a way to see a difference. This is bad, because you waste people's money doing it, and that's kind of a dick move. This almost pisses me off more than ignorance, just because ignorance will generally get worse performance for a price point, but fantasy builds will convince someone to drastically overspend.

Malice. How can you give someone malicious advice on building a PC? Basically, by doing the opposite of fantasy building. You don't want that guy to have better than you, you don't want to suggest the stuff you wish you had, so you suggest worse. Congratulations, if you do this, you're in the running for asshat of the year. Die in a fire. Don't screw someone else over out of jealousy.

Finally, there's the honor bound people. This most frequently will apply to reviewers, bloggers, and fans of certain things being supported by a brand. A good example. Some of the bigger sponsors for competitive SC2 are AMD, Kingston HyperX, and ibuypower. But over at teamliquid.net, the best community site for competitive Starcraft, on the Tech Boards, we refuse to suggest stuff made by these and other big sponsors if they're bad, not cost efficient, or any other reason. Reviewers and bloggers will frequently rave about the quality of a product, and look for ways to make it look good, in hopes of getting more stuff to review.

Guess what. PC components are almost always objective. Preference on certain factors will be subjective, but performance, quality, warranty, and support are just plain facts. Misrepresenting them for any reason, particularly to kiss ass, is just stupid. If you misrepresent them too badly, you'll leave people with a sour taste. If you show the actual quality, and then leave the value of the support of x organization up to the prospective buyer, everybody ends up happy.

A Fool and His Money, RAM Edition.

So, generally, there's a lot of gimmicky stuff available as far as "High Performance Memory" goes. And while there are some slight benefits depending on what you're doing to tighter latencies or higher bandwidth, the real fact of the matter is that on systems that aren't pretty top-end, you could spend the extra money on something else for more performance.

Now, obviously, we have stuff like memory kits that are tested at say, 1600, 1866, 2000, or even 2133 Mhz. That's great and all, but what they fail to tell you in the big, bold, easy to read part of the text, is that... oh yeah, some memory needed to be tested at up to X voltage, which may or may not actually be safe for your CPU's Integrated Memory Controller, or your motherboard's North Bridge and Voltage Regulation.

Next up, heat sinks on RAM! Why? Because obviously, the Enthusiast pumping excess voltage through his hardware is going to make his RAM really really hot, right? Well, the funny thing is, those chips are usually rated for temperatures of something like ninety degrees Celcius. If you didn't know, that is hot as hell. Like, second or third degree burns hot as hell, no sweat. Now granted, cooler temps can help stability on RAM, yes. But really, unless you're pumping some stupid high voltages with bad airflow in your case, odds are your RAM is staying plenty cool without a heat sink.

So, all that being said, yes, some people actually are pushing systems hard enough that heat sinks make sense. I would guess that's somewhere around 8-10% of the enthusiast community, which is probably under 0.01% of people who own PCs. So, those people can buy RAM with heat sinks, and maybe even add some fans or whatever. Cool, no problem.

Now we get to the really fun part. Despite the fact that memory cooling as a needed component is already only slightly less of a niche product than Purina Pet Rock Chow, someone found another way to profit off of the masses of gamers who think that running games makes it vital to install automatic halon fire suppression systems in their rigs.

What is this amusing product? Liquid-cooled memory kits. Now I'll go ahead and credit the manufacturer, Kingston HyperX. These guys already advertise Starcraft 2 pros that they sponsor using their products as nail files and combs, but what are they going to do with this? Beer bong? What the hell, Kingston? The only use I can imagine for this is making your rig look badass with UV reactive coolant.

I think the thing that really bothers me the most is the fact that hundreds, if not thousands of gamers will spend a pile on adding this stuff to their already pointless plumbing loop, either under the assumption that it will help their performance (usually, NO) or assuming that since Kingston HyperX supports E-sports, that they should buy their products.

Now I will admit, supporting sponsors is all well and good for the growth of E-Sports, if you're into competitive gaming on any front. But lets face reality. They don't put money into pro gaming teams because they really like E-Sports. They do it to engender that exact response out of you and make money. So if you don't buy the craziest products they make, it doesn't mean you're hurting E-Sports, I promise.