In the post-PC world, building your own computer seems like a quaint anachronism, a dying ritual harking back to an age when Microsoft and Intel ruled the PC world and Apple only made machines used by graphic designers.
Back then, building your own “custom PC” was the more affordable way to buy a computer, in case you didn’t have the pocket for branded PCs that cost between 50 percent and 100 percent more. But then, our economy got liberalised and the global tech industry got commoditised. Falling import duties combined with global manufacturing moving to China and Taiwan, which could crank out reliable PCs and components by the tens of millions at unbelievably low costs. The differential between branded and custom-built PCs started disappearing. Laptops became much cheaper. And, finally, with the advent of post-PC smartphones and tablets, people started giving up their desktop PCs altogether.
Of what use is a desktop when your latest tablet sports a quad-core processor and 2GB of memory? Who wants a noisy and ugly old box with wires criss-crossing its dusty body when you could have a gleaming unibody aluminium-and-glass iMac?
Well, for beginners, you should.
Four types of PCs
(This story appears in the 19 April, 2013 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)
Hi, First of all i should appreciate the quality of article. You wrote a very good article and a useful one. I want to build a good gaming pc. Could you please tell me how will i get to know which motherboard, ram, hard disk or ssd combination will give me good result? When i ran a search on Google, it threw up lots of name like Gigabyte, Intel, Asus, Biostar, AsRock, MSI, Zotac, etc. How will i choose which one is good? One more question is what are the different types of RAM? I went to the Kingston website and it\'s showing Hyperx Memory Predator, what is that? Is it good for gaming PC\'s or those kind of RAM are for different purpose? How will i define which one i have to go for?
on Aug 27, 2013Whats the model no of the Benq 24 inch monitor above?
on Jul 11, 2013Cool stuff. My assembled home PC probably cost me Rs. 30,000 and it has the requisite muscle power that you recommend: i5 and 8 GB RAM. But, SSDs are nowhere near enough for video lovers like me. So my traditional hard disk has 320 GB and an external one has 500 GB.
on Apr 15, 2013