I have always held to the old saying “buy the best and you will never be disappointed”. It’s far too easy to try and save just a few dollars skimping on things, but it inevitably winds up costing more in the long run. Take something as simple as dishwashing liquid. The brand costing around a dollar may seem to offer a savings over the better brand’s equal amount costing $1.49, but, if it requires twice the liquid to do the same job….it winds up costing more to accomplish the same task. This goes for all types of items. You may save 25% on an item, but if it only has half the longevity of the higher priced item, your overall investment is 50% higher than buying the better piece in the first place.

This naturally goes in the opposite direction, as well. You may think you need the “best of the best” in every component, but often people get confused as to what is the “best” for their particular needs. Take CPU cooling as an example. Say you are building a gaming rig on a fixed budget. Your plan, since the rig is intended for gaming, is to focus on GPU as much as you can while running the CPU at stock speeds or with a small~mid OC. While you are designing your system, you pop a $100-120 air or AiO cooler into your cart. You are thinking this is a great choice because you are buying the best of the best. It also happens to be a pretty bad way to allocate funds on a fixed budget. There are a number of coolers in the $50 range that will do every bit as effective of a job in this scenario, and that savings can go towards a better GPU. While that may seem a small savings, it is literally the difference between a GTX 650 Ti Boost and a GTX 760, and that is a huge performance difference. The point being, when you are choosing your components, the best of the best is what matches your particular needs the best. In the case of a cooler, you are looking to balance performance, price and noise to fit your needs along with excellent build quality.