The Painful Waiting
As a gamer(hardly to say nowadays, with less and less good games) and as a person ,that is keen on performance, I cannot miss the opportunity to say, that the current market stagnation is just awful for the pocket for the users like me. I mean, users who do not want gamers machines, yet something much more than a middle machine. This is the perfect position, or the middle in the PC-configuration, according to the performance/price curve. It’s really easy to recognize the middle, because the prices there starts to grow rapidly.
Having in mind this, I mentioned the current market situation. The VGA cards are running towards the DX10 compatibility, urged by Vista and the new games, flowing today. A perfect indicator for this is the entering of “unusual” VGA producers like Foxconn. The nVidia’s 8800 is selling hardly, because of it’s high price(monopoly) and because of uncertainty. This uncertainty is born by the fact, that neither nVidia, nor Ati are hiding their plans to start their new flagmen this autumn or winter, thus lowering all other prices and giving a whole lot of new probabilities for VGA(both better and cheaper for their specs). Thus most of the normal users like me are waiting for the new wave, so to get on in surfing with the most appropriate board.
On the other hand, the CPU industry is developing even rapidly. A year before Intel’s Conroe roamed against the competition and shattered AMD’s hopes to dust. AMD has not recovered yet and has not reached the competition, while starting some projects like Griffin and the development of their CPU+VGA in one idea(Fusion). They just give another sometimes reasonable option for the home users. Meanwhile, both companies are developing quad-core and even 8-core processors(the second one is in testing). They both say that in the 3rd quarter of this year their new children will be out and will take a stable position on the market. All sites, led by Tom’s Hardware, say today that this will be the best time to buy a new processor and till then maybe it’s better to keep up with the high-end single-core CPUs. After this, we can select something from the new gamma.
So till the middle of the autumn we can only wait(it’s the best we can do, if we value our money). The problem is, that in the meantime our components are depreciating and when the time comes we will have to pay more,than we expected for a reasonable set of upgrade components.
