I do see your point. However, in most cases with technology, you really don’t pay that much more for, say, a EVGA or a Foxconn video card than you do for a “hardly known” brand. While the chipset may be identical, the manufacturing process of the board itself may not be, and in many cases, is inferior.

I buy ASUS, Intel, or Gigabyte motherboards. Again, nVidia/Intel/AMD make the actual chipset and it is software controlled, but the board manufacturing process is different which is why one may be unstable and the other one perfectly fine.

Hard drives are a good example of not buying generic brands. This is data that you don’t want to lose even after you’ve backed up. This is why I never buy anything but Western Digital or, recently, Seagate. Maxtor has started to slip as of late.

With memory, I usually only buy Kingston, Corsair, or Crucial. With Kingston and Corsair, Samsung makes the memory. Crucial makes their own under the name Micron Technology. With most memory manufactuers, Samsung is the most popular type of memory on the board. However, once again, the manufacturing process is different. Corsair and Crucial usually have extremely good heat spreaders built on to the memory, as does Kingston’s higher-end line. That helps performance.

When it comes to networking gear, I won’t touch anything in the consumer market that’s not Linksys or Cisco. D-Link, Netgear, and Belkin have fairly low standards in comparison, in my experiences.

The list goes on. I’m all for shopping around for finding the best deal to save money. I do it all the time. However, I won’t sacrifice the slightest bit of stability or longterm performance for a $10, $20, or $50 difference.

Thanks for the comment!

- Adam

Rubbish!

Generic hardware are generic chips cobbled together… with no name on it.

Branded hardware are - for the most part - generic chips cobbled together… with the manufacturers name stuck on it!

Don’t believe me? Take a PCI card, look at the chips onboard and see who made them. Software drivers tend to drive the main chip on the board, so it makes no difference who made the board. There are exceptions of course, but not many.

That being said, however, I do do a lot of media creation, editing, and encoding. This is the main area I expect to see improvements cutting down rendering and encoding times.

Like I said, I’m a geek. The “trouble” of x64 is worth it to me if I can squeeze performance out of my machine. If I make my decisions right with future applications and peripherals, I really don’t think I’m going to run into much trouble, anyway.

Thanks for the comment!
- Adam