It seems like everything these days is moving towards a subscriber model, rather than owning outright. From endless streaming subscriptions to coffee, printer ink, and perhaps even a gaming mouse, it seems like it’s in a company’s best interests to nickel and dime your bank account—rather than gobbling big chunks of it when you make a substantial purchase.
NZXT’s Flex subscription program allows you to rent that most hallowed of objects, a decently-well-specced gaming pc, in exchange for delicious monthly instalments (via The Verge). According to NZXT’s newly-announced specs, for $59 a month (plus a $50 setup and shipping fee), you can be the proud not-really owner of a Player: One Core i5 14400F equipped gaming PC with an RTX 4060 handling the graphics duties.
That equates to $708 a year (minus extra fee) for a system that should actually handle modern games pretty well, although crucial specs like the RAM size and speed, along with the SSD, are missing from the new specs sheet.
Presumably they come included to make a functional machine, of course, but they do matter a lot when gauging the potential performance of your next PC purchase.
Things scale pretty quickly further up the spec sheet. The Player: Two model features an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X and an RTX 4070 Super. Both great mid-range components, but for $119 a month, that stacks up to $1,428 a year (again, plus fee) for the sort of system we regularly find on discount around the $1,200 mark.
Sitting at the top of the tree is the Player: Three, a system featuring an Intel Core i7 13700KF and an RTX 4070 Ti Super, again, with RAM specs and SSD specs missing. This one’ll cost you $169 a month, or $2,028, and I’ll be honest here, you really shouldn’t be paying that much for this sort of spec in a gaming machine.
It’s not that those components are bad. Far from it, as they’re actually solid picks for a great gaming PC. But when we often find machines featuring the much more powerful RTX 4080 Super for less, it does strike as a bit of a bum deal.
There’s an obvious counter argument here: this subscription system is for people that struggle to save the large amount of cash you’ll need for a good machine, and NZXT are of course expecting to make some money out of the arrangement. Plus, NZXT only expect month-to-month payments that are free to cancel anytime, along with 24/7 customer support, free replacements should something go wrong with your machine, and guaranteed hardware upgrades every two years.
Looking at that RTX 4070 Ti Super machine above, however, that’d mean that if you hung on to the PC for two years in the hope of an upgrade, you’ll have spent $4,056. And that’s around $1,000 more than you’d pay for a discounted RTX 4090 rig if you paid up front. And trust me, not only is that system much, much more powerful than the Player: Three, it’ll also be more than two years before it starts getting close to anything you could call “slow”.
Ultimately, I’d advise against going for a rental option over saving your cash and buying something from our cheap gaming PC guide. There, you’re going to find equivalent machines for less than you’d pay over a year under these plans, or more powerful machines for the same money, and you won’t be draining your bank account each month. One large purchase, done and dusted.
Plus, if you pick well, you’ve now got a platform that should be upgradeable for some time to come, for much less money than you’d pay over the coming years on a subscription model like this.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24435784/tokyostrava.jpg "Strava’s API debacle highlights the messiness of fitness data")
