Cost
An enthusiast PC implies the early adoption of new hardware, which is sold at a premium price. As an example, the video card ATI Radeon 9700 Pro was released at US$399 in 2002. Many gaming PCs support the use of multiple video cards in SLI or CrossFire, making it possible to spend thousands of dollars in graphics cards alone.
Intel and AMD both offer CPU models designed for overclocking. These products are denoted as "Extreme Edition" (Intel; Pentium, Pentium 4, Core 2, and i7 series), "K" Series (Intel; Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge), "FX" (previously used by AMD, and now resurrected as a brand name applied to the "Bulldozer" series of processors) and "Black Edition" (currently used by AMD). Similar to the ultra-high end video cards, these CPUs are not commonly used, and in many cases will not provide a large performance benefit in games. However, they typically do reach higher numbers on synthetic benchmarks, which serves the same purpose for a performance competition.
Read more about this topic: Enthusiast Computing
Famous quotes containing the word cost:
“Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)
“History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the the movements of the world gave a chance for it.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)