Jon Peddie Research has been doing research on the graphics card market for 16 years recently published findings on the enthusiast market.  In the past you would picture the gamer who lives on pot noodles for the majority of the time so that they can pick up the newest hardware just to eek out a few extra fps and grab bragging rights among those with lesser hardware.  The enthusiast market is certainly smaller than the performance segment most gamers fall into, but the hardware they buy tends to be rather expensive.  There are also those who are not going to wait a month to see if prices will fall, they need that new hardware the second it becomes available for pre-order. 

As The Tech Report highlights, this segment is changing and has been growing in number, though the Performance segment is likely to start to catch up.  How could this have happened?  Perhaps because those who have grown up with computer games their entire life have actually started jobs and are making real income?  Even if they never left their parents basements, that is no employment hurdle in today’s connected world and it helps make sure they are home when that FedEx package arrives.


“Top-of-the-line gaming PC components are a big business, according to a new report by Jon Peddie Research. The market analysis firm says that, out of all the money spent on “gaming motivated PC hardware” in 2009, a whopping 46% of it went toward so-called enthusiast parts. In this case, that term refers to “boutique PCs, high-end processors and graphics cards, SSD’s, specialized gaming mice, keyboards, speakers, monitors, etc.”

Here is some more Tech News from around the web:

Tech Talk