GPUs dominate BOM in high end PCs but are they worth the dollars?

I’ve been traveling for more than two weeks – half vacation and half business – and returned to a literal PC explosion. Last Friday when I returned and powered up the aging Compaq Professional Workstation that I use for web surfing, as a print server, and generally as my main work machine, a capacitor blew in the power supply filling my office with white smoke. At the moment I’m limited to my EDN-supplied notebook that is hampered by a corporate VPN making the system not terribly productive at anything other than email access. I’ve also been procrastinating. My son Nick’s PC has been taken over by spyware and needs a Windows reinstall and school is about to start. But Saturday morning I figured no problem computer prices are down. Not that he really needs it, but my son had been talking up an AMD Athlon 64 machine and I figured that I’d assume his Pentium 4 based system. That was before the sticker shock of new graphics boards hit home.

Actually I had been thinking about a new PC during my trip – not that I wanted to face a blown power supply especially on a system with a non-standard supply upon returning home. Our Executive Editor Bill Schweber had emailed me the Walt Mossberg column “Personal computers break another price barrier” in which Mossberg described Athlon 64 systems from HP and eMachines that each sell now for $600. What attracted me was that both came with the Windows Media Center edition that I’ve yet to spend any significant time exploring.

Alas my very spoiled son informed me that the graphics in these systems would fall woefully short of his needs. The systems include the baseline flavor of ATI’s PCI Express 200 graphics chip on the motherboard – presumably as capable as the company’s Radeon Express 300 add-in board. My avid gamer, however, declared the need for the top end Radeon Express 850, or better yet a system based on the nVidia SLI (Scalable Link Interface) technology that allows you to deploy dual graphics processors to drive a single monitor. Basically, he wants $800 to $1200 worth of graphics boards to pair with a motherboard, processor, and memory combination that can be had for $300 to $400.

I soon found the real culprit in Nick’s wishes. He reads a number of PC-centric gaming magazines and those publications offer invariably glowing reviews of the high-end graphics capabilities with no realistic balance as to capabilities or cost. I was soon buried into the evaluation process trying to discern what level of investment would really buy needed capabilities. And the nVidia website was little help. The company has three SLI board families right now – the GeForce 6600, 6800, and 7800. Specs are listed but there is no guidance as to whether two 6600s might be better than a single 6800, or as to what any of the options might offer a relatively mainstream user. The game industry is no better. Today Nick is using a system based on an ATI Radeon 9800 board that is really still a leading-edge product. In fact, I think it’s the same baseline technology used in the Radeon Express 850. But two of Nick’s game offer up messages that his graphics processor is less powerful than recommended for play. And note that I’m not picking on nVidea. The dual-board CrossFire technology coming soon from ATI will also be very expensive.

There are some good balanced sources of info out there. I especially found ExtremeTech helpful. They posted a good review of the GeForce 7800 GT. They did an in-depth comparison of 3D boards back in April that is at least a little dated. There’s also a column by Loyd Case called “Gouging Gamers?” that questions the utility of some of the latest graphics cards. In systems with 19-in monitors there appears to be little reason to invest in the priciest cards and certainly no reason to buy two. So I’ve put the ball back in Nick’s court. I’m contributing the same $600 to the upgrade that the store-bought system would cost. I think I’ve convinced him that a more powerful single board is generally better than two lower-end boards. But the caveat is that you need two boards based on the same graphics processor to make use of SLI. So if you buy a single board today with the though of upgrading later, you may or may not find a mate for you board given the pace of change in PCs generally and graphics more specifically.

Nick is generally frugal with cash gifts at birthdays and other holidays so he has some resources that would allow a significant upgrade over what I’m offering. I just want him to make a decision, because I need a secondary system back in place by the end of next weekend. Even though it is out of date, I would fix the Compaq system were it not for the proprietary power supply. Looks like a long IT weekend looms.