High end video cards aren't a REQUIREMENT either. Cooling is as much a part of the gaming hobby as high end SLI builds are. I don't know anybody with a custom loop (outside a datacenter) that ISN'T a gamer.
I've done both custom loops and SLI in the past. I stopped because other hobbies got more of my interest (and money).
Agreed. I like water cooling because it's a bit therapeutic and the resulting silent machines tend to impress. I'd water cool any machine I build, gaming machine or not.
Now SLI, I gave up on that because the returns just aren't there. Games have to be optimized for it, it doesn't work for everything, some situations show it slower, just meh. No thanks. I'd rather buy the biggest single piece of silicon I can get my hands on and call it a day.
High end video cards aren't a REQUIREMENT either. Cooling is as much a part of the gaming hobby as high end SLI builds are. I don't know anybody with a custom loop (outside a datacenter) that ISN'T a gamer.
I've done both custom loops and SLI in the past. I stopped because other hobbies got more of my interest (and money).
The fact that I purchased a $250 gpu in the 90s, for a $1500 PC, and I made like $200-300/month at my part time job says a lot. $1750 buys a 4K rig these days.
PC gaming is both expensive and affordable. Like many hobbies...
PC Gaming costs have gone down vs the 90s and early 00s.
In the old days, your CPU & GPU were never fast enough and pretty much every generation, or maybe every 2 or 3 generations, you pretty much had to upgrade if you wanted to play modern stuff at reasonable resolutions.
Now, you buy a $200 CPU and stick it in an $80 mobo, and add $100 or less worth of ra m and a $100 SSD and spend 200-300 on a Video card, and you are more or less "good" for like 3 or 4 or even sometimes 5 years.
Late 90s ... a "good" cpu like a PII 400 was like $800
Today, i7s go for around $300.
Late 90s voodoo, voodoo2, cards were generally under $200, but you also needed a 2D card for like $50, and new generations of cards were coming out every year with huge gains.
Used to cost like $300 for a decent hard drive, another $300 or so for some ram, and you wind up with basic gaming PC hardware above $1000.
"overclocking" is expensive today ...
in the old days, Overclocking was simply squeezing a bit more out of your hardware, while sacrificing the various power, temperature, or stability margins set up by the hardware designers
Nowadays "overclocking" is part of the marketing and there are CPU coolers that cost more than the CPU.... But I dismiss most modern day extreme OCing as being nonsense competition.
I have long wished MS would opt for a gamer's upgrade option SKU that includes dosbox or similar along with other compatibility options to play old PC games completely built in and a UI that can function with the XB one controller if need be. Something pre-setup and tested for those gamers that don't want the hassles of maintaining, tweaking and setting stuff up just to play that expansive library because despite it, some old titles are a serious pain to get up running properly on Win 10.
Late 90s ... a "good" cpu like a PII 400 was like $800
Today, i7s go for around $300.
Late 90s voodoo, voodoo2, cards were generally under $200, but you also needed a 2D card for like $50, and new generations of cards were coming out every year with huge gains.
Used to cost like $300 for a decent hard drive, another $300 or so for some ram, and you wind up with basic gaming PC hardware above $1000.
"overclocking" is expensive today ...
in the old days, Overclocking was simply squeezing a bit more out of your hardware, while sacrificing the various power, temperature, or stability margins set up by the hardware designers.
You make great points, but I maybe disagree a bit on overclocking being expensive. You can get a i5 K CPU for less than $300, add a $30 cooler, and get 10-20% more performance. 3-4 years ago, the same money got you 30-40% (partly due to the oc ceiling limiting users). Regardless, you don't need to add a $200 AIO kit to get decent results. Agree on extreme overclocking tho....
PC Gaming costs have gone down vs the 90s and early 00s.
In the old days, your CPU & GPU were never fast enough and pretty much every generation, or maybe every 2 or 3 generations, you pretty much had to upgrade if you wanted to play modern stuff at reasonable resolutions.
Now, you buy a $200 CPU and stick it in an $80 mobo, and add $100 or less worth of ra m and a $100 SSD and spend 200-300 on a Video card, and you are more or less "good" for like 3 or 4 or even sometimes 5 years.
Late 90s ... a "good" cpu like a PII 400 was like $800
Today, i7s go for around $300.
Late 90s voodoo, voodoo2, cards were generally under $200, but you also needed a 2D card for like $50, and new generations of cards were coming out every year with huge gains.
Used to cost like $300 for a decent hard drive, another $300 or so for some ram, and you wind up with basic gaming PC hardware above $1000.
"overclocking" is expensive today ...
in the old days, Overclocking was simply squeezing a bit more out of your hardware, while sacrificing the various power, temperature, or stability margins set up by the hardware designers
Nowadays "overclocking" is part of the marketing and there are CPU coolers that cost more than the CPU.... But I dismiss most modern day extreme OCing as being nonsense competition.
Anyone remotely who was smart back in 98/99 would have got a $200 Celeron 300 @ 450 on a BH6 board than any of the hideously overpriced P2/3s. But as you said, rest of the parts are a whole lot more expensive than the equivalents now.
Skylake i5 OCing makes more sense than Haswell i5 since the headroom is higher and a Z-board is needed to unlock 2133+ DDR4 speeds. Definitely a better value proposition than spending $100 extra for a ~30% OC 4690K over a 4590 instead of simply choosing a 4790K which I did.
Still these days are a far cry from getting 40-50% OCs on 300A and Athlon XPs for additional $0 spent.
You make great points, but I maybe disagree a bit on overclocking being expensive. You can get a i5 K CPU for less than $300, add a $30 cooler, and get 10-20% more performance. 3-4 years ago, the same money got you 30-40% (partly due to the oc ceiling limiting users). Regardless, you don't need to add a $200 AIO kit to get decent results. Agree on extreme overclocking tho....
Yea, my own personal experience was celeron on bh6, then upgraded to celermine 533 @ 112fsb on that same bh6...Anyone remotely who was smart back in 98/99 would have got a $200 Celeron 300 @ 450 on a BH6 board than any of the hideously overpriced P2/3s. But as you said, rest of the parts are a whole lot more expensive than the equivalents now.
Skylake i5 OCing makes more sense than Haswell i5 since the headroom is higher and a Z-board is needed to unlock 2133+ DDR4 speeds. Definitely a better value proposition than spending $100 extra for a ~30% OC 4690K over a 4590 instead of simply choosing a 4790K which I did.
Still these days are a far cry from getting 40-50% OCs on 300A and Athlon XPs for additional $0 spent.
This, so much this. I remember buying a DVD-playback setup for my PC, a PII-300 OCed to 450 Mhz at the time. 2X DVD-ROM, plus sound card, plus video card. Creative labs. I got it cheaper, because it had been returned by a customer, who couldn't figure out how to get it set up.
What fun! Watching DVDs on a PC. It was amazing quality... back in the day, at least. Now we have Blu-Ray set-top players at Walmart for $50, that have even better video + audio quality.
It was fun to be on the cutting edge, at one time.
This, so much this. I remember buying a DVD-playback setup for my PC, a PII-300 OCed to 450 Mhz at the time. 2X DVD-ROM, plus sound card, plus video card. Creative labs. I got it cheaper, because it had been returned by a customer, who couldn't figure out how to get it set up.
What fun! Watching DVDs on a PC. It was amazing quality... back in the day, at least. Now we have Blu-Ray set-top players at Walmart for $50, that have even better video + audio quality.
It was fun to be on the cutting edge, at one time.
Ohh man, I remember buying my first DVD ROM drive and getting PowerDVD... this was back when standalone DVD players were like $200+
I also remember buying my first CD-R for $300 at a computer show. Scary how much some of that stuff costed ...
PC Gaming costs have gone down vs the 90s and early 00s.
In the old days, your CPU & GPU were never fast enough and pretty much every generation, or maybe every 2 or 3 generations, you pretty much had to upgrade if you wanted to play modern stuff at reasonable resolutions.
Now, you buy a $200 CPU and stick it in an $80 mobo, and add $100 or less worth of ra m and a $100 SSD and spend 200-300 on a Video card, and you are more or less "good" for like 3 or 4 or even sometimes 5 years.
Late 90s ... a "good" cpu like a PII 400 was like $800
Today, i7s go for around $300.
Late 90s voodoo, voodoo2, cards were generally under $200, but you also needed a 2D card for like $50, and new generations of cards were coming out every year with huge gains.
Used to cost like $300 for a decent hard drive, another $300 or so for some ram, and you wind up with basic gaming PC hardware above $1000.
"overclocking" is expensive today ...
in the old days, Overclocking was simply squeezing a bit more out of your hardware, while sacrificing the various power, temperature, or stability margins set up by the hardware designers
Nowadays "overclocking" is part of the marketing and there are CPU coolers that cost more than the CPU.... But I dismiss most modern day extreme OCing as being nonsense competition.
in the 90s I lived in the "low cost alternative" world, a couple of friends lived in the "high end world" ...There were cheap alternatives in the late 90's and early 00's, too. The $149 Celeron 300A was legendary for its ability to overclock to 450+ MHz and match that 450 MHz Pentium II. You could even get by with your old Socket 7 (Pentium 1) motherboard and a K6-2 CPU+Voodoo card. Later we got the Duron line from AMD as well as faster Celerons from Intel. The first Durons @ 600 - 700 MHz launched at $112 - $192 in June 2000 according to Wikipedia, and would often hit 1 GHz.
IMO, the biggest difference between now and, say, 1999, is the rise of the "ridiculously high-end" category. I think the Geforce 2 Ultra started this trend. With an insane $500 price tag, it was only meant as a showpiece for the rich kids. Nobody actually *needed* a $500 video card. Today, $500 for a video card is almost considered mid-range. It has only gotten more extreme. The Athlon FX and Pentiom Extreme Edition sold at $999, which seems downright reasonable by today's standards (6950X...). There are other products that fall in this category, such as premium monitors, premium mice, premium keyboards etc.
You don't really need any of that just to play games, though. It's just that Intel, Nvidia etc. discovered that there was a category of consumers to milk, who would pay ridiculous price premiums just for bragging rights.
Before the Celeron 300a, the best bet alternative would be a k6 or k6-2. They didnt perform well in a number of game engine. Regular K6 lacked the FPU power (worked OK for C&C, Quake, Carmageddon, or Warcraft 2, but stick a heavier game like Total Annihilation on them, and they couldn't keep up with a Pentium 200 or a PPro 200. When half life came out, it was almost unplayable on a K6-233 Voodoo combo.