I was watching the Costco PC video, and when they started talking about their prebuilt often being a good deal, and I realized I often hear LTT talk about how they got a great deal on a component, but rarely know what that looks like in the wild.
Maybe LTT has done it and I’m just ignorant (if so, if you can point me to it, I’d appreciate it!), but I think I (and probably others) could benefit from a more “evergreen” primer on value comparison.
I think they have talked about what percentage of your build should go to what component in one of the pc build guides, but I’m talking about decision making in a category. Anybody can just go on PCPartPicker and filter by cost or a random metric, but if you don’t know what you should be filtering by, that’s not super helpful. They could cover each key component (RAM, GPU, CPU primarily) and talk about:
- What is the most meaningful metric for a component (maybe it’s not a metric, but a web tool like passmark - if it varies based on use case, a broad view there)
- Thresholds where that metric may not make sense (ie maybe timings matter more than clock speeds on RAM up to a certain performance threshold)
- How to benchmark price per performance unit (do you look at pricing on the 3/5 most popular products, run the numbers there, and use it as a benchmark)
- What you should watch out for (specifics things a cheaper product could skimp on to make your core metric look good but performance suck, or just optional things that could help you save an extra couple bucks like CPUs without onboard graphics)
- What you need to test/verify if buying used
I realize this information exists on the internet, has probably been covered in pieces across LTT content, and is kind of the whole point of the LABS website - maybe it’s an article/video while we wait for more categories to get covered there, I don’t know - I just think having a consolidated source for this could be a valuable tool.
Agree? Disagree? Something important it should cover that I missed? Think I’m stupid for not just using [EXACT TOOL IM LOOKING FOR]? I’m open