For years, PCs have been marketed like muscle cars. The archetypal magazine ad is a litany of statistics: clock speed, memory, the size of the hard drive, the videocard. Horsepower, rpms, zero-to-60, fuel injection, dual-cam overhead suspension. And it's all presented in a deadpan, just-the-facts-ma'am fashion that says: You don't need fancy tag lines, you're a guy. You want power and performance. And most of all, you want something you can measure and compare.
A funny thing happened with this positioning statement. It worked. Around the time that cars became impossible to soup up because of all their technology, computers became transparent. And the parts, like car parts of yore, were freely available and interchangeable. So gearheads, being gearheads, started going under the hood, tuning and upgrading and making their machines faster and more powerful - in some cases more powerful than they're meant to be - and clocking their monster beast machines and posting the results in public. Welcome to the world of Kustom Komputers.
Granted, this is a minuscule percentage of the total computer market. But it's not insignificant. The leading Web site for computer grease monkeys, Tom's Hardware, gets 30 million pageviews a month. "Our audience in the U.S. is about two and a half million readers, going on unique e-mail addresses and people hitting the site," says Omid Rahmat, Tom's Hardware's head of U.S. operations. "The site is translated into two versions of Chinese, Korean, Japanese, German. There's an Italian one coming. We're close to 6 million readers worldwide." This is a Web site that employs 15 people and does no marketing - it's all word-of-mouth. Content naysayers, take note.
But the size of Tom's Hardware's audience is less significant than its influence. These are the alpha geeks to whom everyone turns to for technical advice - 60 percent of them are IT professionals who are in the business of buying and recommending hardware for their employers. So when an AMD chip outperforms a pricier Pentium in one of Tom's CPU smackdowns, there's a ripple effect on the market.
"You already see a lot of movement toward AMD," says Rahmat. "Now, with the early adopters putting together systems and proving that they work for $1,200 instead of $2,000, with 15 percent more performance, it makes people feel comfortable. So you see this shift, and you can see it now in the products that are coming out from the brand-name [manufacturers]. These hardware enthusiasts are becoming the guys who are leading the market on the PC platform, because the packaged systems have become commoditized."
