Been thinking about a new laptop. Old one was OK - but slow to get going now with things like Whatsapp. And not brilliant for Zoom meetings.
On the reviews I read a Dell comes top of Windose machines, but the pricing seems odd. The Dell site seems to have the lowest price. Better than the headline ones offered by any of the specialists or Curries, etc.
Looking on Ebay, there appear to be quite a few brand new ones for auction. And with what is a relatively new model, lots and lots of 'refurbished' ones. Said to be returns or whatever. Is this just a way of keeping the maker happy? Not undercutting their site prices?
Dell pricing seems highly random. I specced out some laptops for work, one was about 1K more than another (£2.5K v 3.5K) according to the website. One XPS, one Precision (workstation laptop). When the quote came back through the official purchasing channels the prices were almost the same. (although the options weren't identical to what I asked for originally)
I don't know the best way to get sensible pricing as a consumer (they seem to have periodic 'sales' or discount codes or whatever), but note the Dell refurb store:
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(not sure if this is the same or different):
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really good - I've bought from there before and the item was essentially new.
Also to note Dell has up to 6% Topcashback. TCB shows different percentages for Dell Consumer, Dell Outlet, Dell Small Business and Dell Refurbished, so presumably those are all different channels.
I get the impression with all decent laptops that demand is currently exceeding supply. Hence a lot of prices are "what they can get away with".
Refurbished may be exactly that - there are companies that specialise with all the returns to major retailers.
Probably Corona has resulted in lower production or serious worldwide distribution problems. Schools being shut during Christmas has resulted in more demand as has perhaps working from home.
I too have been looking and decided to wait a bit.
For the last few months prices have been silly (often 50% more than pre-covid), however the last couple of weeks I have started to get some at much more reasonable prices - although its not across the board - with some models still much higher than others.
Good all round competent business laptops like the HP 250 G7 jumped from prices around £500 to over £750 at times (and they are still about £670 now).
However some more consumer oriented stuff like a HP 14-cf2502na (14" FHD, i5-10210U, 4GB/ 16GB Intel Optane, 256GB SSD, No Optical, USB-C, Windows 10 Home), has been coming in a quite reasonable prices so I have been doing those retail for £530 inc VAT.
Plus there is plenty of kit still stuck in containers at the docks, and then shortages of many components - especially graphics cards and Intel CPUs. Webcams were hard to get, those have got easier, but now wireless mice are in short supply.
Well, there was a rumor of some buyer having bought $175,000,000 worth of video cards. Which is one of the reasons for a paper launch to consumers. You can run a lot of video cards off one CPU too, with the motherboards that have 18 or more x1 PCIe connectors for mining cabling.
On the Chinese end of the puzzle, the Chinese recently raised the price of electricity in Mongolia. Which might have had some effect too.
One discussion thread I read, a guy tried to put a couple mining machines in his apartment, and managed to raise the air temperature in the apartment to 50C. Pretty impressive. Depending on your setup, you might need AC too in summer.
The craze is still out there. It stopped for a while, but it's back, for alt-coins and for any coin that's re-engineered its mining scheme (so video cards are winners again, and it will take a while to build a mining machine which is better at it).
I saw an article today that said the bastards are buying laptops with integrated high-end GPU and using those for coin mining. That's how desperate they are, to snag every GPU on the face of the earth.
That means certain model of laptops will disappear too.
Oh, well, nobody really wanted to play games on a computer, anyway, right ? All the serious GPU users, want to use the video card as a room heater.
That's not the worst part. When they get the video card, they flash a new flash image into the chip onboard, to change the memory clock (higher) and GPU clock (lower). This is for cryptocurrency mining, where the hash rate (the thing that makes money), depends on memory bandwidth. So they crank the memory to the wall, while the GPU isn't fully utilized and can be cranked down to save power. Now, if you buy a used card from that guy, he doesn't flash the original content back into the card, leaving *you* to find the appropriate file and put it back. So even when they're finished abusing the card, their evil has not ended. The used cards need to be "fixed" so they can be used for regular stuff (driver won't load).
You sound like you speak from bitter personal experience...... :-)
In my case, all I want to do is playback 4k video content either from the satellite tuner cards or from Blu Rays or streamed off NetFlix.
the onboard intel HD graphics on my comet lake just can't do it without dropping frames.
So I've put in a R9 280X. The frame dropping has now gone, but at the expense of losing both HDR and WCG.
The Astra UHD channels play fine with the odd ocascional stutter so clearly need tp upgrade the grpahics card.
I've been looking for Nvidia GTX 1050's.... its all either out of stock or on pre order.
Then I look at Nvidia GTX 1650s...... the asking prices are more than what I spent on buying the components to build my PC and thats wiith recycled peripherals & parts from the old PC (I only had to buy the Asus mobo, Intel i5 CPU, 32GB RAM, 1TB M2 NVME)
I bought a used graphics card off Ebay - not cheap. Wanted one with a DVI output. Paid a good price. Win 10 didn't recognise it was there - even after manually installing the correct driver.
Had a very odd conversation with the seller. Seems he had bought it from a dealer of some sort and hoping to make a fast buck (reading between the lines). Consensus on here and elsewhere was it had been flashed for mining, and attempting to put it back to normal might or might not work. So started a dispute with Ebay. Which he sort of refused to co-operate with. Resulted in me getting my money back. And him thrown off Ebay. I did attempt to contact him for a return address - even went as far as getting his email address from Paypal, but no reply. So I still have it.
and the GPU manufacturers don't provide the firmware images on their websites like mobo manufacters do for their UEFI Bioses or by printer manufacturers for their printers?
At a previous point in time, someone started a web server and collected "original" video card ROM images. And I wanted to change an Apple version of a video card for usage on PC (because Apple/ATI no longer provided support for my practically brand-new card). I picked what I thought was a matching card image, and it worked on the first try. There were two cards in the machine at the time, the AGP needing the flash, plus a PCI video card (with installed driver), used so I could see the screen while the other card got flash upgraded.
Back then, you needed to match the "CAS" of the memory placed on the card (you can look up the memory chip part number for that), and select a video card BIOS with the same CAS value. I selected a CAS3 BIOS image, flashed it in, and it worked, and I played video games on that for five years, without a hitch. This is because there is no CAS timing declaration table on the video card. The manufacturer knew CAS3 was soldered on, and they automatically picked the correct BIOS image for the job. I repeated the exercise, by noting the timing value, then finding a similar BIOS to set the memory controller to CAS3.
The video card manufacturer considers themselves to be under no obligation to provide those. But there are exceptions.
When PCI Express video cards came out, there were two BIOS versions. There was the original type, which OSes still recognized no problem. There was also the whizzy new "GOP" BIOS which meshes with UEFI BIOS. And the file for that was made available on the video card manufacturer site, for anyone who felt they "needed" the item. But that offering was only for the first generation, and later they came up with ways to have just one version and consequently, no reason to offer files on the support page.
Another kind of support issue, is some video cards were made, that didn't work properly with certain speeds of PCI Express slots. You got your PCIe Rev1.1, your PCIe Rev2, and some of the Rev2 cards would not negotiate properly with Rev1.1 slots. What they did for those, is offer a BIOS with the "speed jammed to Rev1.1 rate", which kinda guarantees it works, even if by some measure it's a bit slower. A video card back then, worked OK at 1GB/sec aggregate rate, and typical x16 slots provided 4GB/sec, so there was a good chance you wouldn't notice the effect of jamming the rate down.
The manufacturers of video cards *don't* want to be hosting files. They host files when some technology isn't "ripe" and they're forced to help people. Once the tech screwup is resolved, then it's back to "no backup files for you". Then you have to find a website for coin miners, where they collect original and bodged images for this purpose. Maybe you have to find an Ethereum forum or the like. Since certain cards are noted for cheapness, and fitness for purpose, using such a model number in a search, may help you find an Ethereum forum.
The Dell arrived today. If it was refurbished, as claimed. they made a hell of a good job of it. Even the cables were coiled exactly as they'd leave the factory. Something difficult to do later. And not a mark on it anywhere.
Only odd thing. No instruction book - but obviously online. And the leaflet that did come with it not in English..
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