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Ignorant people measure the worth of technology by the number of features.
In design theory and practice, a major way make products better is by taking things away.
To stick with the car theme, take the Bugatti Veyron. Possibly the most expensive, fastest road car out there. And yet... no radio.
Really? http://www.sybarites.org/2007/05/burmester-sound-system-in-bugatti-veyron/
Better yet, run your own servers to serve up your content, a la Steam. Ensure that unlike P2P, download speeds are always fast, and in these days of shrinking bandwidth caps, you don't cost your customer more bits than necessary.
Make it reasonably priced and *MORE* convenient than the illegal stuff.
"And TV standbys if done properly probably cost around 5p per year. Not a fortune."
Right. The problem is the hundreds of millions of these leaky devices combining to drain a significant amount of power, not your personal cost of 5p.
Anyone who has *any* clue at all will only be confused by random product codes for only as long as it takes to type that product code into the google/wikipedia search box. In google you most likely won't even have to click a link - the short summary will have the specs. Additionally, there are guaranteed to be links among the first few leading to reviews and comparisons to other CPUs. The 'research' involved in CPU shopping is not involved at all.
And as for people who go out and buy a computer without knowing a core from a hard drive, and don't enlist the aid of someone knowledgeable (salesmen don't count), they generally buy by price anyway and won't be using it as a gaming rig so the innards are largely irrelevant.
You might not care who makes the turbofan for the plane you're flying in, but I'm sure the airline did their homework to figure out which engine manufacturer suited their needs the best. And while *you* may not care about what kind of engine is in your truck, many do, which is why a hemi is specifically advertised as such.
I thought they handled the fdiv issue quite well. I was sent a replacement chip along with prepaid packaging to send back the defective P90. Nevermind that for most users the bug was a nonissue, esp. with OS workarounds.
And yet a Q9650 still costs the same as it did 2 years ago. Fuck you, Intel.
I think they were referring to the Corvette in that episode - they seemed amazed that a pickup truck suspension could result in such great performance.
"Thus the fan aren't working at constant speed, but are varying their speed to constantly find the perfect balance between silence and avoiding the card catching fire under the load."
And that's the problem with NVIDIA cards. The fan stays at 40% until the card is near overheating, and only then will the fan jump into 100% "oh shit" mode. And to change this behaviour you need a 3rd party util because what NVIDIA provides (a driver addon) is broken, and has been for as long as I've been using the latest NVIDIA card.
It's pretty pathetic for NVIDIA to write drivers that require the use of 3rd party utils to achieve sane fan behaviour. The GTX260 I bought was the first video card that I'd bought that required such a massive cooling solution, and I thought that since the cooling hardware seemed fairly capable, the software wouldn't be a problem.
Imagine my surprise that, by default, the fan is set to run at 40% without *ANY* ramping, and only jumps to 100% when the card reaches ~85C - when it's basically overheating. Thanks NVIDIA but I'd rather live with a bit of noise from higher fan speeds than turn my case into an oven.
You can download an addition to the NVIDIA drivers that allows you to manually set the fan duty cycle (which works), load profiles with alternate fan duty cycle % depending on temp (which works, badly, because the profile loading locks the comp for a second, and this isn't fun when you're playing a game), and set a fan ramping profile with a graphical curve (which has never worked, and since it's been 2 years, I can only assume never will)
Why they can't fix this is beyond me - RivaTuner is capable of directly reprogramming the fan controller, and is trivial to set up to smoothly ramp (without any CPU load) the fan speed in response to GPU temp. 40% at 40C and 100% at 65C. On demanding games I usually top out at ~61C and 80% fan speed. Sure it's a bit noisy, but that's always been the price of good cooling (barring some exotic expensive solutions).
If you push the "extra ice" button on the soft drink vending machine, you won't get any ice. If you push the "no ice" button, you'll get ice, but no cup.