Being the First to Buy Computer Technology

[Buck]

I just saw some people that ordered each the new WD2000BB drive from computers4sure online store.

First, I think the fact that no one has these products would prevent me from one.

Secondly, this online store is advertising a product (the JB) version when it doesn't exist.

Last, I suppose someone needs to be the guinea pig.

 

[Clocker]

I'd wait at least a month, read reviews, and verify what the vendor is selling.

C

 

[SteveC]

I buy something when I can justify the price, which for me is usually long after its been out. I also like to be sure there's no major problems with it.

Steve

 

[Sol]

I guess for me its yes and no.
I was one of the first on the block to have a GeForce 3 and an Athlon XP. But that still a good month or so behind the first people to have them.
Here in Oz we just can't be the first so you usualy know what your getting by the time you are able to get it.

 

[Tannin]

Generally speaking, no way!

First-release products are, with very few exceptions, more expensive, poorly supported, liable to failure and a host of driver issues and incompatibilities. Sometimes, they offer better performance, but in most cases the established product it is designed to compete with will, at that time of its development cycle, be considerably faster, or at least competitive.

It's not true to say that a new product is never a good buy, but it's almost true.

 

[The JoJo]

Some years ago, yes.

Now, now way. After a few months of being in the market the products look much more attractive to me.

 

[Fushigi]

When I needed better performance or was out to fix a specific bottleneck, yes. But now that performance improvements are more subtle and my bottlenecks cost milliseconds vs. seconds, no.

I also second Tannin's statement regarding first-release products. I've been burned a couple of times and am not anxious to waste time fixing what the vendor should have tested before releasing the product.

- Fushigi

 

[Tannin]

Let's see if we can't do a quick tour of the possibilities: CPUs. These are one of the few products where first release versions can be worth buying. Sometimes. Starting with the 386, what do we get?

First 386. No way. Vastly expensive, little performance gain.

First 486. Ditto.

Pentium 60 and 66. Ditto.

Nx5x86. Never tried it.

Cx5x86. Yup. A good product from day one. Good value too.

6x86. The very first ones (i.e., the ones that never made it to Australia) were, by all accounts, dreadful. But the first ones that arrived here, a month or two after they hit the States, were OK. Tricky little beasts till motherboards and fans improved, but decent value at least.

K5. Very slow, but not too dear and few problems. Gave them a miss till the 133MHz one arrived.

K6. Good from day one.

Pentium II. Seemed to work OK from day one and perform well, but at the price you could have bought a small country anywhere in Central Asia instead.

6x86MX. Good from day one.

Celeron. You are kidding, right? They were terrible. Quite possibly the worst CPU ever made, though at least they were reliable enough.

K6-II. Good from day one.

Celeron A. Good from day one.

Pentium III Katmai. See Pentium II.

K6-III. Good from day one.

Athlon Classic. Rather dear, demanding on power supplies, but good from the start.

Pentium III Coppermine. Bar absurd pricing, the chipset disasters, and Intel's inability to actually supply us with any for the first year or so, a good one.

Duron. Good from day one.

Athlon Thunderbird. Good from day one.

Pentium 4. Reliable enough, or so I hear, but poor performance and dreadful pricing. An excellent product to avoid.

Athlon XP. Good from day one.

Operon? Let's wait and see.

Actually, it is interesting to see just how many CPUs are actually quite good right from the start. The ones that were stand-out bad buys seem to mostly have been Intel's first complete new generation chips, which generally offer previous-generation performance at completely absurd prices, and don't even have the poor excuse of platform upgradability. But there have been other duds too, primarily where there needs to be a fresh generation of support hardware arrive before the product is really simple to configure and can be trusted. (The early non-Intel Socket 7 chips are the best example.)

 

[Cliptin]

I looked back in my records and found that, before the recent massive upgrades, I purchased my last MB/proc on Aug 08 1998. It was a Supermicro P6DLF and a PII-333. I was a big supporter of the incremental upgrade and so my primary criteria was support for the 128MB of SIMMS I had already purchased as well as support for DIMMS which I expected to move to in the future. I also wanted an AGP port and dual procs. I figured it would be easy to increment to NT and another proc. I had completely skipped the SOCKET 7 and I needed another incremental upgrade.

I went with the PII because, at the time, there was no forseeable future for AMD. Even if they had parts on the far horizon, there did not seem to be an upgrade path accoding to all the websites I could read. Their current part had not been "fast" for almost a year and four months.

I had been incrementally upgrading the first system I ever bought since Feb 16 1996. Until recently I have only ever owned two MBs and three cases. I am now pretty sure I could have had better value for my money by going with a K6II but I did not have an avenue for selling old parts.

Tannin, Given the time frame of 7-9/98 and $500 what would you have suggested I had done?

PS. I'd have to say,no, I'm not an early adopter.

 

[Santilli]

My two cents, unless something brakes, never...

Most of these companies, intel in particular, have 2000% depriciation, or more, in two years. It's absurd.

At the time you bought your machine, I was buying a mac desktop, with a 333 mhz processor. Couldn't justify the price now, but, I bought it then :roll:

I also bought a Dell P2 400 mhz for the office, another incredibly stupid move, in light of the cost to performance, but, on the other hand, I think this machine, with another video card, and a fast, Quantum LM, is no slouch. Adequate for law work, etc.

So, I think you made a couple excellent choices, and, did you ever add the max processors to that mobo, when they became dirt cheap,and what is the max processor for that board?

s

 

[Santilli]

By the way, to quantify the reasons not to buy...

As money gets tighter here, and companies cut back, they cut back R & D first, and let the consumer do it.

I won't, period.

I just heard adaptec has one mac guy, working part time, doing all their drivers, and, they are laying him off, since macs aren't using their cards anymore.

Maybe because the drivers don't work, or, the cards they promised, and apple promised, oem cards, don't work, we don't believe them anymore, and won't buy any of their crap?

Just my opinion...

:evil: :x
s

 

[Tea]

I seem to be Tea at the moment. Oh well, so be it.

I'd have bought a K6-3/300, Cliptin. On 10th August 1998 our list price for a P-II 333 and board was A$1030. That was a VIA chipset baby AT board - the cheapest way to get into a P-II. But if you wanted something more-or less future-proof in a P-II board, then you probably wanted to go with a BX board - and they were dear. A P-II 333 with a BX board listed for $1230.

A K6-2/300 on an FIC VA-503+ listed for $690 - barely half the price of the P-II combo. Integer performance was superior (because of that 100MHz FSB that you didn't get in a P-II unless you shelled out an incredible $1450 for the P-II 350 - or just went stupid and bought a 450 for $2000 even.

Floating point performance was well down, of course, but people often forget that the AMD and Cyrix chips were able to multi-pipe a mixture of FP and integer instructions, which the Intel chips couldn't, and this made them better performers at a real-world mixture of FP and integer instructions than the benchmarks showed. (The Intel parts, on the other hand, while they couldn't do 1FP + 1INT instruction, could do 2 x FP. So it all depended on how many tasks you ran and what instruction mix you had.)

And on the other other hand, if you were into gaming, Intel didn't have any SIMD abilities then (unless you count the anemic MMX) whereas a lot of games supported 3DNow. In short, unless you had some very specific FP-heavy requirements, a K6-II/300 was equally useful and half the price.

As for the upgrade path from there, there were three main possibilities:

1: K6-II/300 and board for AU$690 Chip-upgrade to a K6-III/450 in August 1999 for $300 changeover: total cost: $990.

2: P-II 333 and VIA or LX board for $AU$1030 You've already blown your US$500 budget, so you can't upgrade it next year in 1999. If you find some cash do it anyway, you might have bought a K6-III/450 and board for $710 less about $150 trade-in, or about $550, or else you could have had a P-III 500 (the old, slow, external cache Katmai) for $1130 minus that same $150 trade-in.Best P-III board then was still the BX. Total cost either $1580 or about $2000.

3: P-II 333 and BX. Upgrade to a K6-III for $550, or chip-upgrade to a P-III/500 for $800. Total cost either $2000 or $2250.

Dualies I don't have pricing for. In fact, to this day, I have never sold a single dual CPU board. Not one. I did own a dual P-II 333 once, but I pulled the second CPU out and sold it because it didn't do anything under W98 (which is what that box was used for). Eventually I got tired of the poor performance of that Iwill LX-chipset-based P-II 333 and swapped it out for a K6-II/300, which killed it in every way. As a matter of interest, I still have the same main board in the same box (which lives in the workshop) but I gave it to Tannin who slipped in a K6-III+ and runs NT on it and uses it for burning CDs and folding proteins.

Oh, and I happen to own a dual ASUS Pentium Pro board. It has grown old and is no longer quite stable. (It's pretty close, but not quite). I did think about using it for my new FTP server and a little folding on the side, but I decided that the damn CPU fans were too loud to put up with and that I wanted to run either OS/2 or Linux on my server anyway. So it's sitting idle. Guess I'll just give it to Tannin for his collection.

 

[Mercutio]

I'd have very little difficulty being the first to adopt a new model hard disk.
Other stuff, I'd rather wait. I did take a leap of faith for KT333 not too long ago. That was a surprisingly good experience. Motherboard chipsets are normally the last things to buy early.

 

[Tea]

Yup. New hard drives are usually a safe bet. though there was the odd exception. In Seagates, the first RLL drives were a huge disaster, and their first PRML desktp drives were a minor one. Most people seem to think that their first fluid bearing model was dodgy also (the Medalist Pro 7200), but I always had good luck with them myself. Still, when you consider the vast number of different technologies Seagate have pioneered, hard drives are a pretty safe bet. (No doubt, the same applies to Maxtor, WD, et al.)

CPUs: hmmm .... despite Tannin's post, most new CPUs are just fine. I bought Thunderbirds and XPs and Durons and K6 things without a moment's hesitation. I should imagine that most habitual Intel buyers have had similar experiences.

New chipsets: no thanks. Not unless (like the KT333) they are more or less the old model revised, rather than a whole new design.

New video cards: no way! Especially if they come from one of the known problem children. (Can anyone say "ATI"?)

New RAM? Wait a while.

New OS? Wait a long while.

 

[simonstre]

Well, when my #1 source of information says to me "Buy.", I buy. When he says "Don't touch this with a 10' pole!", I listen. He is well informed...