Yummy Haswell-E Mummies

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On a chill November evening in 2014, a solitary and exhausted enthusiast hitherto enamoured by most things green, black, chocolatey….

I meant PCBs. Apologies, got really confused there. Start again. A pensive PC-er previously placated by most things pix-elated and of enviable electronic eminence was ensconced at his desk.

The timeless void that was this website yielded nothing by way of assurance as he desperately delved the depths of his dwindling desires, determined to document despite a dearth of ideas. No, its no good. I shan’t do this every time, I resign.

There was once a comedian, Russell Brand was his name, who regularly sought a slew of syllables to construct his sentences and construe his sentiments where in truth, a succinct sprinkling would have sufficed and instead of Noam Chomsky’s spiritual successor, we savoured Johnny Rotten with an Oxford Children’s Thesaurus.

The enthusiast in question was myself, deflated, demotivated and dogged by a creative drought. This is me a few days later, still cocooned in the cold sigh of November 2014 but writing in the present tense. Perplexed? Good!

I’ve begun countless articles on negative notes. I’ve lamented over the way we learn of new hardware, specifically motherboards, processors and video cards along with two over ripe, worm ridden iPhones. The knowing of all before it comes to pass, NDA’s with less authority than a nanny of twenty’s declaration of bedtime on Halloween. The fatiguing confusion fuelled by excessive choice, itself brought about by caustically cynical marketing.

A few chronicles ago I cited the expanding network of telepathic tech-sites and their teams of pathologically productive journalists. Their effortless accuracy in executing and interpreting innumerable benchmarks and in delivering pages of painstaking analysis, the facts as lucid as the arguments logical.

I referred to how difficult things had become for the prodigiously knowledgeable, yet penniless hobbyist but at least strove to paint a positive picture for the most proactive. The snappy self publicists, the inspiring faces of IT independence.

How do they do it? How does one sustain the appetite to relentlessly review products whose key selling points offer barely any scope to be original? Visually they may differ in every detail but flowery rhetoric is tarnished by generic terminology:

The NEC Mutisync EA244 UHD and PA322UHD are two exciting new entries in the company’s 2014 catalogue. Each model proudly exhibits a reference quality LED IPS 4k display panel, AH-IPS for the smaller sibling and IZGO-IPS for the larger, perfectly calibrated for the most demanding professional desktop publishing and non-linear editing applications, making them indispensable to prolific videographers, photographers, and commercial printing houses.

The slighter screen sports two single link DV-I ports with a maximum supported resolution of 1920×1200 and twin 1.2 Display Ports capable of 4K 3840×2160 at 60hz. Also resident are twin HDMI ports, a built in triple port USB 3.0 hub and both monitors possess the unique ability to receive four signals via separate inputs and display each picture simultaneously at 1080p…….blah blah blah. But that’s all the in the manual and can be accessed on the site.

Summary. they’re denser, sharper, brighter, better, require less watts but burn a bigger hole in your trousers. You’ll likely never see one in the flesh, so here is some titillating imagery to aggravate your feelings of inadequacy.

Forum reaction – Pffffft! 24 inches for 4k when 28 barely enough LOL! As for the 32, give me a Dell or an Asus and £1000 to for a camera thanks, hell, I could grab a Canon 70D with a passable lens for that.

I’m sorry. I’ve just never been as good at this as all those whom I admire, and many I do not and I wish it were easier.

Remember those days when even the most bullish of board partners took months to hone their in house homages? When EVGA’s supercilious “signature editions” were as scarce as shark’s gums and Asus’s Black and Mars in shorter in supply than winning Wonka Bars…..

Not again…..quickly, somebody quash these crude allusions to confectionery namesakes and allow me to concentrate. I asked if you recalled, be it with pleasure or pain, the dawn of the of the decadent GPU rehash. Circa 2009. When parts like the Asus GTX 285 were comparable in rarity to ruby hen’s teeth or even…a Voodoo 5 6000? While the latter was famously, and tragically, never permitted to account for the tuition fees of febrile 3DFX fanatics, the launch price of the former was a mortgage worthy $1299.

This awarded the customer two fully fledged premier division GPUs, piping their pixels from inside one of a thousand credibly crafted cowling shrouds.

Come forth five years, to a frosty November sundown compounded with a deep sense of deja-vu and oh my, how trends have transformed.

No sooner have Intel and Nvidia indulged our core-most cravings with the majestic heights of Maxwell and Haswell and all vanilla flavoured variants met with voluminous and rapturous reviews, then their enhanced, enriched, fitter and fatter counterparts emerge faster than Fox News Headlines and are as common as three leaf clovers.

Sadly, there is one thing that remains a constant, their relative price. You’ll still have to forgo that scholarship, sell grannies silverware, part with your precious LPs or dare I say, flog that one month old Asus GTX 980 and donate your X99 Deluxe…who on Earth would want one of those now?

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