It’s probably nothing sinister, though.
  • borari@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    13·
    5 months ago

    I’ve started seeing people, who really should know better, referring to the PC tower as the CPU. As in, “I bought a bracket that mounts to my variable height desk which can hold my CPU up off the floor and let it move with my desk”.

    Bro I’m looking at a picture of a custom water cooled PC here, you should know the fucking difference between a CPU and a computer case.

    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      61·
      5 months ago

      Eh, that’s been a thing for a long time. Decades at least.

      I think that the problem is that there isn’t really a great term to clearly refer to the “non-monitor-and-peripherals” part of the “computer”. “Case” would refer to just the case, not what’s in it. “Tower” or “desktop” is overspecific, refers to particular form factors. I have a tower, but some people have under-monitor desktops (though that’s rare today) or various times of small form factor PCs. If I say “computer”, that doesn’t really clearly exclude peripherals.

      And honestly, we don’t really use the term “GPU” quite correctly either. I’ll call a whole PCI video card a “GPU”, but I suppose that strictly-speaking, that should only be talking about a specific chip on the card.

      • rebelsimile@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        5 months ago

        8 bit games would label the computer player as CPU as a shorthand, I honestly probably got snapped at by a nerd sometime in my teens for making the mistake and got the central processing unit lecture so I don’t really make that association but I also never heard anyone pronounce “NES” not as an acronym prior to YouTube, so, I figure different people have different experiences also.

    • DoctorButts@kbin.melroy.org
      2·
      5 months ago

      I learned everything about how to build a PC from buildapc… like 12 years ago. Nowadays it has been infested by idiots who don’t know shit but act like they do, and also think more RGB = more better.

      • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
        3·
        5 months ago

        I don’t know what happened, but I put together a PC for the first time in some years, and holy mother of God, all the components have RGB LEDs slapped on them now. I had to actively work to find parts that didn’t have RGB LEDs on them (and I still accidentally wound up with some on the motherboard). I mean, yeah, LED case fans have been a thing for a while, and there was always a contingent that put electroluminescent strips on their computers. And it kinda grew into a lot of keyboards and mice. But now it’s a large portion of CPU fans, most cases, RAM sticks have RGB LEDs, motherboards have RGB LEDs. I didn’t have trouble finding non-RGB LED NVMe storage, or non-RGB LED SATA drives, but even there, you can get them. Hell, there are RGB LED cables.

        I can only assume that a large portion of the people building PCs these days are doing it to have them physically blinged up.

        Like, nothing wrong with wanting to do that, but I couldn’t believe the tiny proportion that wasn’t doing that.