Building computers vs. buying them

Dr Zaius

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What are your thoughts concerning building your own gaming rig vs. buying one from a company that makes quality gaming computers?
 

Redwolf

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Never seen a decent power supply in a pre-built computer. Or the best mainboard I could get.

Also, when things break, why would I send the whole thing back instead of the broken part? With my data on it?
 

Aries

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No contest, if many years have tought me anything, the pre builts cop out on something eventually. Either it's last years tech, or it's the cheaper part or they try to milk you for cash by supposedly treating you to a "nice" software bundle that's likely to be deleted as soon as you realise how lame the software truely is.

Anything you can buy pre built, I can match for 2/3s the price. That's not a maybe either.

The best way to build a system though, is to know what your friends like, and know what brands they buy. Most of my stuff is often pre enjoyed stuff that is still reletively "new" (6 months to a year doesn't count for much). I usually get it for even less than a great retail price at a great source. My friend gets a major discount off his upgrade as well.

Parts usually evolve at differing rates as well.
I might like a "neater" monitor.
It will be a long while before the mobo needs attention and my processor is fine, as well, the ram exceeds my primary needs.
My current video card likely greatly exceeds my personal requirements.
Now I might go for a new burner drive. I think a dual layer might be a cool upgrade.
 

freightshaker

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I built my comp last year at this time. Still runs great and I know exactly what's in it, how it's configured, and what it's capable of.
 

Mike

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buying a pre built one is better imo, you get the warranty if anything does go wrong, its easy to buy, doesnt take ages to get up an running, and...I wouldnt know how to even start bulding a computer.
 

Aries

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buying a pre built one is better imo, you get the warranty if anything does go wrong, its easy to buy, doesnt take ages to get up an running, and...I wouldnt know how to even start bulding a computer.
Last sentence is the only one that made sense :)

Every part comes with a warrantee.

I have never had trouble buying parts, when in doubt ask for opinions, heck everyone loves to offer those hehe.

Second last sentence is only valid while last sentence remains valid.
 

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I guess the best answer to the question is what does someone want to do with it.

For the average user, it makes sense to buy one prebuilt. I have had friends ask me to build them one, and when all costs are factored in, Dell will be cheaper for someone who is only going to surf the web.

I build my own when I replace them, just because I want to be able to do other things. It is hard to find a prebuilt computer that I can integrate into my lab, and still play games on it on occasion.
 

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i have no idea on how to start building computers so for now im happy with buying pre-built systems.

My alienware pc is doing great, main use for it was for gaming and for digital art based work. Games are all running on highest settings, programs like photoshop dont crash when i have a lot of documents open with tons of layers. And its perfect for mutli-tasking for my needs.

however, i do believe its a ton more expensive then building your own system :( oh well.
 

Redwolf

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OK, in all seriousness:

Building a computer sucks. If you just build one of a kind. If you buy all the parts for one computer and it doesn't post, then what? You don't know which part failed. And unless you build one twice a year your last computer's parts are incompatible with the new one, every single one of them down to the PSU. So POST, not clue which part to send back to warranty.

Buying a premade computer sucks.

Do you know what a bad PSU does to your computer? Can, and does, easily kill all parts in the box, including the harddware. Even if you have two mirrored in RAID-1. And there is nothing worse than a sub-par mainboard where the mainboard maker doesn't release some essential BIOS patch for some obscure problem that you with your graphics card or your harddrive or USB suffers from but few other people.

Or Maxtor drives. So you get a Diamondmax9 in your premade computer. Now what? You know it will break on the first instability of your city power. Replace it? No warranty? Send it back? Cannot, it's not broken.

What if the box is slightly, just so slightly instable, let's say it crashes once a day? The premade vendor will always blame Windoze, drivers, instable city power or the phase of the moon. All the while, the instable box slowly but securely overwrites all your precious files (even those you didn't touch in months) with binary junk.

And don't get me started on overclocking. If you can devote the time to it, and can build computers frequently enough to be able to cross-trade parts, then you get a heck of a lot more performance out of it - stable, if you learn how to test and not overdrive, takes about one week testing for each clock. Now, the trick is that you have to learn that anyway (the testing) even if you don't overclock because not all computers are stable at stock speeds.
 
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Dr Zaius

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In the past I have always built my own systems. I could hand-pick every component, and I also knew what was in the PC if anything went wrong. This allowed me to build systems that were--at least in my opinion--better and faster than what you would normally see on the shelf at CompUSA or whatever.

I have been using an Alienware for the last 2 years and have been very happy with it. I picked all the components in that as well, but the Alienware techs did a better job setting it up than I could have. Those guys know a lot of little tricks and I learned a thing or two by examining how it was built. Of course, it is probably fair to say I could have bought all those components myself for somewhat less, but I do feel I got a sound value out of the extra money I spent.

I now have a brand new system from Falcon Northwest that I am in the process of writing a full review for. This is sort of a "dream machine" of sorts, equipped with an outrageous list of ultra-expensive components.

So how does the Falcon perform? You'll have to wait for the full review, but I will say the only game I have found that can slow it down is Microsoft Flight Simulator on full settings. It tears through FEAR, Half-Life 2, and Prey with ease. However, it has not been completely stable, which is something I did not expect from a PC costing as much as a small car. I'll have a more complete story for you when I post the review.
 

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would picking the components yourself from a company like alienware be considered as a pre-made pc? thats what i did, choosing the parts and getting them to build it XD

I would reccomend everyone ignoring stores like pc world. Pre-made computers like that are rubbish as they'll always have something rubbish in them <_<
 

Mike

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oo sounds like a pretty nice PC Don, did you actually need all the really good stuff or did you because you could lol?
I mean if I was to get a new laptop I always think bigger is better, but I have a 40GB hard drive atm and it isnt all used up, I have a DVD RW drive but I havent written a DVD, can do that on the other PC, but still I barely write them.
Just wondering Don are you loaded? lol
 

trauth116

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I think I have been building my own PCs since about 1998 or so. I believe I have done 13 or more b now. I don't go in for the latest and greatest of anything when building them, but components that I know work, and work well together.

The problem I have with building my own is what I call "Frankenstein syndrome" -where i just can't leave good parts lying around, and build another damned computer- so basically this means that I have 3 computers that are coming to me here in Australia. (No monitors - was talked into getting flat screens down here, which made sense compared to a big fat set of 20 inch LCD screens).

The advantages to me are- that by necessity you learn about "the guts" of a computer (you sorta have to in order to make it work). You know where components are when something goes pear shaped (example- I had a Packard Bell way back when - they used a proprietary battery maybe soldered into the mb - the battery died, the clock failed- my computer "forgot" it had a HD, etc - the stuff you could figure out from reading PC's for Dummies -called the phone center (which iirc was in India), the guy could not figure it out - wrote me up with a service call to replace MB, HD, cables.. something as not in stock - so I had to wait ... and wait .. and wait... and ... Zzzzzz.... a few months later the repair guy gets to me - after something I did not need shows up -> it's the battery - we talked - I opted to replace the battery, it worked - I learned that a 'help line' was pretty useless, etc... )

I replaced that PC with something from a mfg's auction -it was all re manufactured stuff. I think it was ATC or something like that... it worked fune for a few months -until the day i had to do my taxes - and I was smack in the middle of it when it karked it.... #@%&!!! -Up to that time I had done a few upgrades, so I just decided - F-it, and went to the local OEM parts guy and bought a slew of stuff and put it all together, earned all about installing OS's, and at that time iirc the HD's were not pre-formatted either.

Well anyway, I have never been sorry for doing it myself, although sometimes it is like a massive PITA puzzle that can really get stressful if you can't come up with an answer; I've taught myself that I do have to sleep on things at times (even when I really don't want to leave a problem undone.)

The only exception to this -of course is laptops -- will buy laptops - and have never really upgraded one. Am really not into 'proprietary' stuff, when it comes to memory or HD's - think it sucks - but then again what can you do -without spending your life researching it out... usually not worth it for the laptop when I can play with the desktop to accomplish whatever.
 

Dr Zaius

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oo sounds like a pretty nice PC Don, did you actually need all the really good stuff or did you because you could lol?
That's a good question. Obviously, I play a lot of games in my capacity as an editor and I feel I should be able to play the games the way the developer intended for them to be played. That, and I'm one of those people who likes to play with all the settings maxed out. I suppose the answer is a little of both.

Xtreme-gamer could have purchased a very nice gaming rig for about half what was paid for this one, however, we also wanted to do a review on what is widely considered to be the cream of PC game rigs. Falcon Northwest has an impressive reputation.
 
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the computer i have now is the first one i actually built myself, and im so damn proud of it, its so nice that its working, its working well, and its because of me, and yes, it had some faults and glitches, but i fixed them, making me even more proud! the one before was a custom job from my local independant computer shop (who i now work for) and both of these 2 have been lovely, the ones before however were things like tiny and dell and packard bell, and i had no end of problems, the only reason i know so much about computer now is that when the old ones broke all the time, i got pissed off with having to wait for someone to get back to us, or to keep having to call up help lines, so i taught myself how to do stuff so i could just fix it and move on :) also another benefiet for me is that i work for a computer shop, that makes things alot easier as all the people around me have ALOT of experience and i can get cheaper parts and easily return broken/incompatible items!

P.S Don, is this your computer per chance?
 
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Redwolf

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Regarding the question of whether you need a high-end computer or not:

First of all I have important data. I have raid-5, a server-class PSU, a mainboard with a flawless BIOS and harddrives of my choice (after hours on storagereview and my own experience ) in my main workstation/server, plus my own cooling.

I use ECC (error correcting) memory in my workstation/server. This is very hard to get unless you go to a platform with registered memory (usually dual CPU boards which I don't want for space and noise reasons). Unregistered ECC in the AMD world only works on a handful of boards and you need to know which. You might have to flash the BIOS which in a prebuilt PC might raise warranty issues if something else breaks.

When it comes to speed:

I don't know whether that sounds odd or not but I think that even a $2000 PC today is very cheap. I started building computers when I had to pay $8000, and that is before inflation. (*)

My attitude is that my time is so precious that if I sit down and play a game, then I should have the best experience from the game that I can get. So I keep at a high edge CPU-wise (not too expensive if you overclock) and I usually have the best graphics card of a recent generation (currently 7800 GTX). I think that my time is worth that I play on a $450 card.

(*) I should mention that I drive cheap cars that I pay cash. From the monthly car payment you can afford quite a decent computer.
 

Dragon2611

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My desktop is custom built, i get what I want in it not what some stupid manufacturer thinks is a good system

Problem with most prebuilt systems is unless you pay though the nose you get a decent spec cpu and probably a reosonable amount of ram but the video card is usally a pile of poo.


I did look into buying a Core2 dell when my motherboard was playing up a bit and i concluded id have had to pull the thing to bits, change the psu and the graphics card and put my sound and wi-fi cards in... which would probably mean no warrenty and being no better off when i started.

Next pc may be a store bought one, if i find myself playing games even less than i am now i may seriously consider getting another laptop and ditching the desktop all together.
 
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I say for anyone who has some knowledge with computers, to buy a prebuilt one and upgrade from there, if you know what you're doing, invest in building one, and if you have no idea then buy prebuilt.

I got mine prebuilt because I was 13 (14 now) and wasn't too good with motherboards at the time, now I could build my own but I choose to upgrade mine. My 256mb video card isn't enough for me, I NEED MORE POWER :D

EDIT: Don that is a nice case. How much for it :p

Also the new Intel Core 2 Duo is the sexiest processor ever. I may get the Nvidea 7900GTX around summer and also add another gig or 2 of RAM since I have a 1 gig now, it'll do me good for a while. Also Another LCD screen for dual screens seems like a possibility to me too :)

I love computers :p
 
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Dragon2611

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I say for anyone who has some knowledge with computers, to buy a prebuilt one and upgrade from there, if you know what you're doing, invest in building one, and if you have no idea then buy prebuilt.

I got mine prebuilt because I was 13 (14 now) and wasn't too good with motherboards at the time, now I could build my own but I choose to upgrade mine. My 256mb video card isn't enough for me, I NEED MORE POWER :D

EDIT: Don that is a nice case. How much for it :p

Also the new Intel Core 2 Duo is the sexiest processor ever. I may get the Nvidea 7900GTX around summer and also add another gig or 2 of RAM since I have a 1 gig now, it'll do me good for a while. Also Another LCD screen for dual screens seems like a possibility to me too :)

I love computers :p
i believe the 8600 is coming out soon and its at least as good as the 7900 if not better (prolly have dx10 support)
 
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