Faster, Baby, Faster!

Baldwin Louie — Mon, 23 Apr 2001 15:00:00 -0700

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."

There is a whole network of information that supports this gearhead culture - trusted editorial voices like Tom's, component retailers like CNET Shopper, and glamour sites devoted to lurid tales of extreme overclocking. (Overclocked CPUs are juiced up to run faster than they are supposed to. They also run hotter, which has given rise to a plethora of exotic refrigeration devices and folkloric experiments with liquid nitrogen.)

All this makes it harder to be a computer manufacturer. Because if you're Dell, now it's possible for people to run your configuration through a price comparison and find out exactly what that combination of parts costs, and whether there are less-expensive options. It brings a greater degree of transparency to the transaction, even if that person has no plans to build his own computer.

There are two arguments that computer manufacturers use to justify their value in this context. One is that putting together computers is messy and difficult - kids, don't try this at home. But kids (and adults) have been cracking open their computers for several years now to replace video and sound cards, hard drives and CD-RWs for burning all those MP3s they downloaded from Napster. So the "Wizard of Oz" argument is breaking down. A mist of technophobia still shrouds the CPU itself, but that's the last obstacle - it's only a matter of time before people figure out that replacing a CPU is easier than assembling Ikea furniture. There's only one way to insert these components. The cables are all color-coded. These days, it's more or less dorkproof. Your mom's not going to do it. But your teenager will. And with the economy slowing, people are more likely to upgrade for 200 bucks than replace a $2,000 computer. It's hard to argue with four-figure cash savings.

The second argument that bolsters the Compaqs and Gateways of the world is the idea that they support their products, that you get a warranty and it means something. The problem with that argument is that a) customer support is generally lousy, and b) most technical problems are not hardware problems. They're software problems, for which the computer manufacturer is not responsible. Installing Windows on a newly built system is a snap next to upgrading Windows on an existing machine, and for help with that you're at the mercy of Microsoft.

When it comes to drivers for video and sound cards, people who build their own systems may have a slight advantage, because the gearhead sites are more alert to glitches and faster to prescribe solutions. Last year, the editor of Tom's Hardware was the first to discover a flaw in the 1.13GHz Pentium III chip that eventually resulted in a recall.

The ultimate danger for computer manufacturers is not that build-your-own replaces build-to-order - for most people it's not worth the effort to grab a screwdriver or open a case. The danger is that brands like Dell and Compaq and Gateway would erode to the point where they're almost meaningless, to the point where people really do think of their computers as Intel plus Microsoft, or AMD plus Linux.

At the logical extreme of that trend, you have a shift in purchasing behavior for computers, away from the car-buying model (buy something expensive, replace it every few years) to something that looks more like a stereo-buying model (upgrade the amplifier, buy better speakers, add a subwoofer). Over the years, the parts change, one at a time, but the stereo, per se, is never replaced. Besides a price break, the stereo model alleviates the angst of instant obsolescence - you don't have the experience of buying a $2,000 system only to discover something faster and cheaper a few weeks later. It gives the consumer more control, and more flexibility. And to that extent, it destabilizes computer manufacturers' business model. Even as sub-$1,000 Net appliances push computers downmarket, the high end (with its high margins) is being nibbled away by do-it-yourselfers who want speed on a shoestring.

So Compaq is not happy if the Lego approach to computers takes hold. But who wins? For Intel, it's a double-edged sword. On one hand, people are likely to upgrade CPUs more often than they replace computers. But if they're comparing benchmarks on the Web, all those expensive "Intel Inside" advertisements are far less effective. AMD, on the other hand, has a lot to gain from this - it is already the favored brand among the kustom komputerati, who like Athlons because they're fast, cheap and easy to overclock (AMD makes a stern face and wags its finger about this, even as "outlaw" overclocking boosts its cachet). Second- and third-tier manufacturers in Taiwan also benefit because their products are reviewed alongside the big brands and evaluated on merit.

But as this trendlet gathers steam, the biggest winner is the consumer. Not just the first-world consumer who can pay Dell to ship the box, but also the third-world consumer, who doesn't have that luxury, for whom a few hundred dollars makes the difference between owning a computer and not owning one.

In places like China, Russia, India and Brazil, putting together a computer - or paying your cousin to do it - may become the norm, if it hasn't already. There are millions of gearheads in these places with time on their hands and spare parts in the back. Gentlemen, start your engines.

J.C. Herz is the founder of Joystick Nation, a consulting firm in New York.

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Faster, Baby, Faster!