Latest Update: 25 August 2021
If you’ve ever taken a look at the prebuilt PCs available on the market, you might have noticed something. You can see two computers being sold side-by-side, and they’ll have different generations of CPU. Even if they’re the same generation, they might not be the most current generation.
Does Special Edition just mean “normal CPU from 2017”?
UPDATE: Almost a year later, one of the biggest computer companies in the world is still advertising this system, unchanged.
What’s the deal here?
Big PC builders have to buy their components in bulk, because they always need to have stock available for immediate sale. Because of this, they naturally end up with old stock when newer hardware is released. You might be thinking that the prices will go down when the new parts are released, but these computers are usually stocked by retailers who already paid the original cost prices. They have no incentive to give you a lower price on these computers.
The only people that benefit here are those big computer companies who bought the CPUs in bulk. They get to save a ton on CPUs without passing any of those savings on to you.
What else can you do?
Wait, buying prebuilt work computers isn’t the only option? You mean custom PCs aren’t just for gamers? That’s exactly why Modena Computers exists. We’re a boutique workstation PC builder, and every one of our PCs is built to order. We keep very low stock levels, operating on a JIT (just-in-time) manufacturing and stock-keeping methodology, which means we always get the latest parts for every build. You get to take advantage of all the latest technologies, and it won’t cost you any more than the old parts.
There’s a misconception that last gen’s CPUs are good value, because they’re often discounted below the price of more current CPUs. In reality, newer parts might even cost you less than the old parts, because a lower priced tier of the newer generation could perform better than the higher tier of the old one. One relevant example is the i5 11400, which outperforms the i7 10700, but costs a lot less.
Old hardware is irrelevant.
It also means the system would have a greater upgrade path.
Let’s look back at that example of i5 11400 vs i7 10700. The i7 could be upgraded to a 10th gen i9, but the i5 could be upgraded to an 11th gen i7 OR an 11th gen i9.
It would also have access to newer and higher performance parts, like PCIe 4.0 SSDs and higher speed RAM.
Why Us?
As you can tell, we are constantly working to ensure that each of our systems gets the most cutting edge tech possible.
We spend a lot of time on research and development, and your experience with our systems is much more important than pushing old stock.
Of course, we haven’t even mentioned our attention to detail when it comes to things like testing, overclocking, and cable management, but you already know about all of that, because you’ve taken a look at the posts below.
Build of the Week: Dual Xeon Part 1
This is the most exciting system we’ve had the chance to put together in a very long time. Computational Fluid Dynamics is a field that requires more CPU cores than the number of syllables in its name. Our client for this build wanted a machine that was up to the task of optimising the aerodynamics
Perfect Intel Core i7 Revit modelling setup
Ordered and paid for yesterday – delivered to the customers door today! It looks like we are on a roll with Revit workstations lately. This week we had a request come in for a Revit workstation designed for peak Revit modelling performance for around R22 000 and included in that price, was a 24″ monitor.
Biggest order yet!
Customer Requirements & Background Ok so this post is a bit late, probably because we were too busy building to write the blog post, but at the start of the year, we got one of our biggest order to date, with over 20 Vulcan Workstation builds for their drawing office! 22 Vulcan’s for general CAD
Multi-core Machine for Maya
Customer Requirements & Background This week, we saw a request come in from a company specialising in 3d animation. Their main program used is Autodesk Maya 2020 and their main challenge with their current hardware setup is that renders were taking a long time to complete. Modena Computers Proposal Since CPU rendering was the main
