Vadim Chobanu

In this article i will try to uncover the obstacles to “bespoke high end custom pcs” growth and what could be done to overcome those. Initially it will be a good idea to define the market and its demand and i can do that from my previous experience and observations.

For the purpose of this article I will use the value of a custom system of at least 5k to classify it as a bespoke high end pc. Ok, many of us will never get even close to spending that much on a system, yet the market exists and it could potentially get bigger if some of its obstacles are to be removed.

Now, to define the market for such high end systems I would say that they are:

- Predominantly male individuals with sufficient disposable income, a ‘less than average’ attraction to real life socialisation and ‘higher than average’ attraction to computer games and competing.

Please note that there is no age mentioned above and it spreads from adolescents all the way to pensioners. There is also no specific pattern of occupation and can include pupils, students, young professionals, bankers, designers, accountants, company directors, stylists, retired people etc. (I won’t go into discussing the psychological differences between male and female however, I am yet to meet a female that spent 5k or more on a gaming system)

And now to define the product specifics it must be:

• An exclusively looking system.
• Very high end configuration – tomorrow’s technology delivered today.
• Superior customer service.
• Knowledgeable and able crafter.
• Business level service and repair support.

Nothing out of ordinary it seems for something that comes at a premium is there?

Very true, yet delivering all the above to a niche market in a single territory (country) cannot be a very scalable and profitable venture due to the market size which unfortunately is not very big and for now it has no prospects for substantial growth. I estimate currently the total UK high end luxury PC market at around 3-5mln a year and no single competitor can have more than 30-50% market share at any point in time. That translates to about 1-1.5mlnsingle company turnover, which for many wouldn’t be a venture worth of pursuing, unless there are other branding benefits.

Why the market is so small? In order to understand that, i will draw a few parallels with the luxury cars market in specific.

Further comments to the above and how can the market be increased? -

Tool to impress/build confidence/get recognition. I place the emphasis here on the fact that you don’t normally walk around with your beast workstation gaming system you just bought unless you go to a LAN party once in a while. Surely, a sports car does rarely utilise its true potential in terms of speed, nonetheless, you can see them every day in the smoke of London.   Hypothesis – if the Gaming High End PCs would become something you take outside at least once a week for other people to see, the market would grow at least 100-fold overnight. Not Feasible.

Can be serviced locally if it breaks down. Now this is the trickiest part of them all. From my previous experience I can say that most of the local PC repairers have absolutely no clue about unconventional cooling methods utilised in high end PCs and even replacing a faulty water-cooled graphics card would require a return to base or engineers visit. Hypothesis – if local support and repair can be established and performed as well as at the base, within the first 5 years, the market would grow exponentially. Probability – dubious using conventional methods. Costs of training would be too high to bear for a company alone and the competitors are unlikely to create an alliance.

Requires no different to ‘regular product’ skills to operate. Operating a sports car is not much more difficult to driving a normal car, yet operating a high end PC, would mean you need more than average PC knowledge, such as: reset the BIOS, reload overclocking, top up liquid if required, reset graphics cards occasionally, reinstalling windows due to the buggy drivers/SLI/Crossfire.
Solution 1: Educate the end users. Probability – unlikely.
Solution 2: The components combination used in systems are very reliable. Probability – unlikely in the next 5-10 years.
Solution 3: have a local PC technician at hand for a small charge. Probability - see above local service.

Relatively long life-span, This is just to comment that a sports car built 10 years ago would drive much faster than today’s cheapest car, however todays cheapest PC would be much faster than a PC built 5 years ago. Obviously this is one of the obstacles that throttles the buying decisions of expensive PC for the usability factor as any extra pound spend over a certain amount will give just marginal increase in performance that probably would be beaten by newly released hardware in 6-12 months at much cheaper cost.

Well established second hand market. We can argue that cars lose value in the same way as PCs, yet a high end Custom PC will totally lose value over a 3-4 years life-span and will practically have no residual value. A luxury car will lose value as soon as it drives his first mile, yet the value loss will be less evident between lets say 6 years old and a 7 years old one.

Parts pre-tested in real life before final product assembly. This is another reliability factor and as mentioned above – that is unlikely over the next 5-10 years. The new hardware release is so frequent, that manufacturer’s simply do not need to do the practical testing as well as that is done for car parts where human lives can be in danger out of something malfunctioning.

Product assembler has most parts made in house or for them. As with the above – this is impossible for a local boutique business.

Well established logistics. New cars are normally delivered by specialised services or own solutions as well as there are approved dealer networks in operation. Majority of PCs are delivered by generic national or international couriers and as such they are not suitable to deliver or install such PCs. Damages caused by couriers is the biggest nuisance to an end user and biggest loss maker to a PC maker. Transit insurance does not always cover the value of damages unfortunately and even if it does, they never provide for loss of goodwill. Hypothesis – if a courier company is to provide a bespoke delivery and installation service for high end PCs with no risk of damages, this would nearly replace the need for local servicing. Probability – unlikely. Cost of training and operating such service would be too high for them.

Way forward:

Now out of all above arguments only 2 obstacles can be theoretically removed – the well-established logistics or local service. I won’t comment on the organisation of a logistics system that will service this market as I am not sure on how attractive this proposition would appear to a courier financially; however I have what to say about the local service.

Again, this is just a theory:

A National, and then Global Franchise is to be established under the same business model as any other franchise yet the additional advantage to this is that there is no initial need to rent a dedicated and expensive business premises and neither does it have to be a full time job from the day one for the franchisee. All can be done from a cheaper workplace or even from a suitably equipped home.

The Franchisor will provide the training, parts, admin support and necessary national advertising in exchange for an initial small fee paid by the franchisee. Obviously the franchisee selection process must be very rigorous as from my previous experience, out of 1000 people that can build PCs, just a few are capable of delivering a well-built high end machine.

All orders must go through the franchisor’s website online and the parts will be supplied as required by the franchisor to the franchisee including all the modifications required/custom cuts/paint jobs etc. The customer will have the option to choose his PC maker as well as interact with them over the forum. Each franchisee will have their own about page with the examples of their work, pictures etc. Naturally this will create competition and facilitate the keeping of high standards/service from the franchisees as no one would want a local customer to be lost to the neighbouring area where the builder does nicer builds/better service. All the support will be via the website’s custom designed CRM directly between the builder and customer, yet any administrative and accounting queries will be handled by the head office. The parts RMA and all the accounting will be handled by the head office, so this leaves the franchisee to focus on supporting his customers and builds. Profits from each build would be shared according to a predefined arrangement and if there is any warranty purchased, that will be defined as well.

Naturally regular conferences and experience exchange would be held regularly, where new ideas could be discussed, brainstorming and feedbacks etc.

This is just another crazy idea that I had, but in all fairness it can be done and it could turn into a nice international business with worldwide presence. Would I do it? Nope, thank you. I would much rather be involved with CRM/ERP/Ordering/Invoicing system setup, accounting and developing procedures etc.

Thanks for reading

I was an advocate of watercooling and always believed in it. I believed in it so much that I even invented and developed my own waterblock for the VGAs. If I was to have that product 3-4 years earlier, probably it would have been successful, now I struggle to see a long term demand and wont bother investing any more time or efforts or even think about it.

Probably many will say that I am gone mad, yet I have valid reasons for that and below I will give the technical explanations behind it.

1) The CPU manufacturing process is shrinking and the current generation of Intel CPUs is at 45nm, due to move to 32nm later on this year. I hear many say ’so what has the manufacturing process to do with the actual watercooling being obsolete?’ It’s simple – more components packed together in the same size will need quicker heat exchange by the exactly same area of contact and the copper commonly utilised in the industry is starting to bottleneck and no matter how quickly the liquid will be pumped, through the CPU block and how cold will that be, the actual CPU temperature will be quite different from the overall ambient liquid temperature.

Example: back in 2006 when Core 2 Duo (65nm launched, the watercooling made a big difference to how much you could push your system to. To stably overclock the first batches of E6600 CPUs to 3.6Ghz on a commercially available air cooler was almost impossible, yet possible with watercooling. It actually made a big difference to the overall CPU temperatures. Now, with the launch of the Core i7 the watercooling struggles to give you as much quantitative benefit when compared to aircooling and I believe that will shrink even more when the manufacturing will move to 32nm. Unless of course diamond or diamond based heat exchangers and compounds will be widely accepted as a cooling standard. One of the latest attempts in this domain was reported by Custom PC not long ago - http://www.custompc.co.uk/news/605550/researchers-create-new-thermal-material.html

If it will be cost efficient, then there is still hope for watercooling to be effective for a few more years to cover the 22nm CPU manufacturing, but probably not as much for the 16nm later on.

Fact: If you look below at the E6600 world records you will see all attempts were made using one sort or another of extreme cooling, such as liquid nitrogen or cooling cascades.

Now if we do the same search for the newer core i7 CPUs, we would notice that in the top searches we get even aircooling and watercooling alongside the liquid nitrogen. That makes a watercooled Intel Core i7 CPU 27Mhz faster than watercooling, leaving even some phase change cooling results behind.

A ‘better’ alternative to watercooling is considered Peltiers/TEC (Thermo Electric Cooling) which is being adapted for use in PC systems by the Canadian Cool IT and in the UK an interesting attempt at using the concept was done by Kobalt Computers, where a Core i7 CPU was overclocked to 4.4Ghz with fairly interesting temperatures as reported by media. I was never a believer in TEC due to the efficiency limitations (the best peltier will only achieve 67% conversion efficiency and that is behind other technologies (PSUs are currently at 80-90%), yet the concept works. Maybe its not the quetest cooling, but it works.

Achieving 4.4Ghz from a Core i7 with good temperatures is pretty impressive, yet the price or availability for the full system was not released and I would imagine they are quite prohibitive in the today’s climate when no-one wants to spend money. A smartly built aircooled system with the same components wont be that far of from those results and that is fact.

My second argument today against the need for extreme speeds is also simple – what for?

A few years back it was understandable – to play the latest games on the highest settings you needed to overclock heavily and always have tomorrow’s technology. Today there are not that many games that wont play very well on a aircooled and overclocked to 3.6Ghz Core i7 with a few high end VGAs from AMD or Nvidia in it.  So the only purpose of watercooling would remain  - noise removal, which will win against the TEC concept.

I understand that not everyone will agree with me, please feel free to comment

  

Gaming High End Desktop Replacement Laptop

I didn’t like the laptops for many different reasons. Historically the majority of them were having proprietary parts that were not compatible with each over – PSU, Optical Drives, FD, HD mounts etc and I hated that you couldn’t upgrade them as normal desktops. Back in the days, I even came across some BIOS limitations that didn’t allow me to install a different windows version – i.e. instead of the originally installed windows 98, to upgrade it to windows XP. Lets just keep this short and say – I wasted too much time on useless laptop troubleshooting/upgrading which lead me to hate them.

About 4 years ago, it all changed with the Clevo D900 Laptop for me: desktop-type CPU and Chipset, full size keyboard, proper high resolution screen; all the parts inside could be upgraded/changed – beautiful! Only downside to it all was the weight, heat and battery life as you can imagine from a 17″ Gaming Laptop. Just to make a comment here for those who haven’t heard of Clevo. Clevo is a OEM manufacturer of laptops chassis and as such, you normally wont come across this name, but instead you could recognize their products under Alienware, Rock, Eurocom, etc brand names.

Anyway, I liked the product, however, not long after that, the heat issues  proved to be a problem. Different parts inside were failing more often than we wanted – HDs, Memory etc. Looking back, I can tell that the majority of these problems resulted from improper use. I will elaborate. The laptops have ventilation holes at the bottom and naturally they shouldn’t be obstructed. If you use this laptop just stationary as a desktop replacement, then its fine. If, however the beast is to be used sometimes as a ordinary laptop, then you will more than likely obstruct those holes, when placing it on your laps or other non-solid surfaces. What does that mean? Shorter life for your components.

Read the rest of this entry

I would like to mention again that to get a PC you can build it yourself, ask a friend to do it, buy a ready-made one or get a custom pc from a system integrator. I pointed out in a previous blog that if you are after something decent, you are probably better off simply not buying an off the shelf PC, so this blogs question would be – which company to go for when buying a Custom PC and what to buy?

There isn’t a universal answer for that unfortunately. And please don’t expect me listing all the UK companies who make custom PCs as you can find them all in Google… Except some companies, which are not very good at SEO (Search Engine Optimisations), however you will find those easily by browsing PC magazines such as PC Pro, Custom PC, PC advisor etc. Google does a good job at what it does, however let’s not forget that a company can be brilliant at building and servicing PCs, but for one reason or another it won’t show in Google in the top results. A good example is Scan and Armari. If you are looking for a custom PC in Google it is very likely you won’t come across them and if you don’t read magazines, I guess you may lose a lot as both these companies have been around for a while, however they have been focused on keeping the existing customers happy, rather than getting new business. The life-cycle of a PC is around 2-4 years and when you are long enough in business, the same customers will come back and one day you will feel comfortable not to advertise as much as before.

Anyhow, let’s assume the list of companies that build PCs is in front of you ready and it’s a matter of choice now, who will you trust to take your money?

• The first and most important – can they build you the PC you are looking for? I guess the list will get shorter as some SI’s are focused on different price brackets to what you are looking. You have the £299-£499, 499-999, 999-2499, 1500-5000 price brackets. It is easy to classify each company by simply looking at their offerings and promotions.
• What I would look for next? Reviews, testimonials and general forum’s feedback. If a company has been a bit in business, it is very likely someone has left at least some feedback. To find that – google is your friend – use ‘problems’ and the company name you are researching. But again – don’t trust everything you read, especially for young companies or all the negative feedback – as sometimes it was left by someone who can never be pleased. Or the type who sees the glass always half empty. I feel sorry for those.
• Next, the warranties – take your time to read that, however please note that a young company will generally offer a more attractive story to get more business and generate more positive feedback.
• Once you are happy with all the above, (I guess the list will become shorter) i would look to put the final tick – check the company financials and background. I use a company called ‘company searches made simple’  however there are plenty of them on the market to provide a risk assessment on each and individual company. This is crucial, especially in the today’s market conditions.

So, as we narrowed down our list, it is the time to decide which PC to go for.

I wont go into technicalities in this article yet, however I would like to stress one important fact. It is only natural to assume that you can have pretty much what you want made custom for you as long as you have the dosh. However, looking for something very high end can be the fundamental error sometimes. It is like wanting a hotrod of the custom PCs. It will be fast, but it doesn’t mean it will last for very long or work like a clock all the year around. Owning a hotrod will need a lot of service just to give you that short ride of ultimate adrenalin gratification. Cram inside a good case the latest of everything, cool and tune it nicely and you have it – a PCs that will top the benchmark leader-boards, for a while.

So what can be wrong with wanting something nice and powerful? Let’s suppose you have the money, found the system integrator to make exactly what you wanted, you buy it with warranty of course and a few weeks later you have it – your Dream PC. I bet it will feel good. But what if the PC breaks down? The warranty covers it, I hear you say! The System Integrator will collect the PC, find the fault, source new hardware and possibly implement modifications, return the faulty one back to the supplier, rebuild the machine, maybe reinstall windows and then ship it back. So we are back at the same question – what is so fundamentally wrong with wanting a very high end PC?

The above is ok if it happens once… or twice… But what if the hardware doesn’t want to work as you expected? Who will we blame? The motherboard, CPU of VGA manufacturer? Nope, the system integrator – he has put it all together and charged for that – let him be so kind to fix it. We did exactly that all the time – no matter what the fault was, we were prepared to work non-stop to get down to the root of the problem.

Now, let’s imagine that the PC you purchased from is a decent company, who will get out of their skin to help you. Will you be happy? Probably for a while, however your frustration will grow each time a PC will be returned for repair and break again after. One of them reasons for breaking is that sometimes hardware manufacturers will release new hardware with unstable BIOS or even bugs in hope to provide fixes later. At first such hardware will pass all the tests a PC will go through while at the system integrator, but the real life use will be a bit different. Sometimes it can be the power fluctuations will affect a high end PC, the different humidity and even the different ambient temperature. Who is to blame again? Doesn’t matter, but you will have no PC while it is being fixed and having to help troubleshoot or make arrangements to be in for couriers to pick and return the PC, maybe you have confidential data on the PC – numerous reasons… Is that what you have expected from a Dream PC?

A high end PC will generally be also over-clocked. Over-clocking, so much popular nowadays, may affect your experience as well. It probably wont shorten the life of a component as much as generally thought, at least on the CPU level, however the motherboard may act a bit differently to what it normally should. Examples would be – random BIOS resets or the necessity to power the PC down and on in a certain way to avoid that. Again – nothing major that a true PC enthusiast should be scared of, but not exactly what is expected from a normal PC user who is generally afraid to update a BIOS.

So, the morale of the story – even if you have enough money to buy a very powerful PC, think twice before doing so if you are not a PC expert. Save yourself a bit of hassle and get something a bit less powerful or at least follow what a system integrator tells you. If someone has been in business for a while, he may be able to suggest something appropriate for you and making a call to such a company will put you in a better position to decide what you are really after.