Spec Ops and PilotKD are right on. Any hand built PC is going to be vastly superior to a pre-built in every way. Why? B/c you will be using name brand, top quality parts which are meticulously and lovingly assembled by the best hands posible: yours.

And best of all? It will cost you about 40% of what you would pay Dell, Compaq, Sony or any other manufacturer.

 

Another thing regarding backing up data and harddrive failures; harddrive failures are a fact of life. It can happen 2 days after building a computer, 2 years after, 5 years after or anywhere in between. There is no way of knowing. The same applies to Dell's or any other pre-built computer. Dell doesn't make the harddrives. Do you think the harddrives going to Dell are of any better quality than the ones you can get from Newegg? Heck no. You should ALWAYS be backing up your important data. My wife and I have transfered everything important around to 2 desktops and 1 laptop in the house so we have multiple copies of important stuff. With as cheap as HD's are these days, there is no reason why one couldn't buy a 40-60gig HD for $50-60 (with a 3 year warranty!) and use it as a backup drive in the computer or how about a RAID setup? The days of tape backup, zip drives and floppies are gone. Again, with as cheap as HD's are, unless you're buying a 10k RPM Raptor, I could order one from Newegg and have it on my doorstep in 3 days with their standard FedEx 3 day shipping or I could go down to Best Buy and possibly find one with a rebate (like the one I have as a backup in my PC now). A HD failure is going to be a pain in the ass no matter how you cut it. It's going to involve reloading everything that you've come to love on your computer. All your personal stuff that you've downloaded and things that you've made "just right". Hours of labor flushed down the toilet and getting a Dell is not going to make anything different.

 

that is not entirely true. I'd even go so far to say it is blatantly false. Building your own system is fine for people who want to, but despite what you might hear on internet forums, white box parts are not superior to retail boxed parts, or the same parts from Dell or Gateway or anyone else.

If you know what you are doing, you can easily spec out a custom machine, have it built by someone like Dell, get their warrantee, and save money to boot. You can always find a way to spend too much no matter which way you go, but buying parts and assembling a system is not the way to save money on a high-end system. You have to know what you are doing either way, but you can get the same parts in a commercially built system with a bit of research. Not every company offers every part you might want, and you won't get a motherboard you can overclock, but you cannot just throw random parts together on your own and expect it to work, either.

 

 

Not true. You do not have to buy "white box" when building your PC. There are plenty of top of the line parts available in retail boxes. For example, I'll usually pay the extra $$$ (usually $10-20) for a retail boxed processor because they come with the 3 year warranty vs 1 year and are of the best quality processors that come off the line (why else would the manufacturer provide a better warranty?). They are usually the best ones to overclock if you choose to do so. I only buy retail boxed video cards, motherboards, and memory.

Go through the "Wish List" I just created over at newegg and see just how many "white box" OEM parts I've used in that system. The only OEM parts are the harddrive and the CD-ROM drives. One thing about OEM harddrives that many people don't realize, is that they have longer warranties than their retail boxed counterparts (1 year vs 3 year). If you go to Best Buy and buy a harddrive, most of them only come with a 1 year warranty. Not so with OEM. They are usually all 3 years and the OEM Western Digital Raptors come with a 5 year warranty (same as retail boxed). And the system is still $1000 cheaper than the XPS system I built:


COOLER MASTER TAC-T01-E1C Silver Aluminum Alloy ATX Mid Tower Case without Power Supply - Retail
Model #: TAC-T01-E1C $129.50

THERMALTAKE Silent Purepower W0014RU ATX 480W Power Supply - Retail
Model #: W0014RU $59.99

ABIT FATAL1TY AN8 Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail
Model #: FATAL1TY AN8 $185.00

ATI 100-435513 Radeon X800XL 256MB GDDR3 PCI-Express x16 Video Card - Retail
Model #: 100-435513 $329.00

AMD Athlon 64 3500+ ClawHammer/Hammer 1GHz FSB Socket 939 Processor Model ADA3500ASBOX - Retail
Model #: ADA3500ASBOX $267.00

CORSAIR XMS 1GB (2 x 512MB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) Unbuffered Dual Channel Kit System Memory Model TWINX1024-3200C2PT - Retail
Model #: TWINX1024-3200C2PT $115.00

Western Digital Raptor WD740GD 73GB 10,000 RPM Serial ATA150 Hard Drive - OEM
Model #: WD740GD $183.00

LG L1930B 2-Tone 19" 25ms LCD Monitor - Retail
Model #: L1930B $363.00

SAMSUNG TS-H292A/BEBN Black IDE CD Burner - OEM
Model #: TS-H292A/BEBN $25.50

NEC ND-3520A Black IDE DVD Burner - OEM
Model #: ND-3520A BLACK $52.99

Subtotal: $1,717.98


There are too many websites with loads of info out there for you to have to "throw random parts together" and expect it to work. Building your own PC is not as unpopular as it was 10 years ago. There are websites dedicated to the do-it-yourselfers that test and review every new piece of hardware that comes out so you can see how it'll perform.

 

This one actually comes with a sound card, as well as over 4 times the hard drive space in much faster RAID 0, not to mention an OS, mouse and keyboard, and speakers. The processor is a P4 3.2GHz. Other than that, it is comparable. $1645.00 :

http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/con...RELM&m_29=SQ3OS

I'm not saying buy from Dell, I'm saying that while it is all fine and great to build your own system, you aren't really saving any money. Not that that matters, but for my money, I'd take the Dell over the crippled "custom" system of PilotKD's, IMHO.

 

I agree with the others that you should build your own. You will get a lot of experience with how the internals of a computer work. If something does go wrong, you can rely upon the experience you gained building it to fix it.

If not, choose alienware. Their computers are rock solid and I hear their support is great too. Dell used to have amazing support. Now you'll end up talking with someone from india reading from a script.

I have a computer consulting gig on the side. A lot of people ask about which type of computer to buy. I almost always recommend Macs now. I never recommend dells because their support sucks!

 

[QUOTE=Spec_Ops2087,May 19 2005, 06:15 PM] normally items in prebuilt computers die for a reason -- they are worthless parts. They are quiet becuase the manufactors like dell, gateway, sony don't care about having the processor run at 70C where as if you build your own it is a sin to have it over 50C and obviously with lower temps means more circulation which means more fans which means more sound, but who cares if you are doing your computer good. I don't know where you got heat from? All parts give off heat regardless who makes it, if anything prebuilt computers don't make the rooms hot because they don't have any circulation going through them.

I too have built many computers and sold them to many friends of mine -- no problems sofar with ANY of my equipment. why? because I use name brand parts. I use Asus / Abit / MSI motherboards -- I use western digital hard drives -- I use crucial RAM. All are name brand parts...I don't use intel motherboards or FIC motherboards, I don't use the dreaded IBM hard drives that die in under a month -- I don't use some nameless RAM -- those are all the reasons why you have to use the warranty for pre-built computers.

Reliability? I built a dual athlon MP server 2 years ago -- I have NEVER had 1 lockup sofar that wasn't caused by me (and if you want me to clarify what I mean by that, I overclocked it and to find a stable speed you have to first know where it is unstable at). Aside from that, I had to return ONE part and it was DOA -- RMA'd it got it back in a week, never had problems since. The computers that you build are only as reliable as the person who makes them and installs the software. I'd say 99% of the computer problems today are caused by people who know nothing about computers and just install and download stuff without knowing that it even does.

If you want a good place to buy parts --- www.newegg.com

 

Talk about blatant falsehoods.

I've owned a Dell AND an A-ware desktop, so I have first hand knowledge of their pricing. I just hand assembled my latest PC for $1500. The same desktop with equivalent parts from Dell would've cost twice that much. I'm not even gonna touch A-ware...

You go, girlfriend!

 

Wow, what a firestorm.

I see that people are passionate about building custom systems and for the most part I agree that they are a fun project if you are building them for yourself (building them for others gets very old, very fast). I did this for a decade. I know all the arguments, pro and con. I'm not sure that everyone is grasping the con arguments entirely.

Here's the flaw in the argument for custom PCs that no one has touched. Building one system will always cost more than building 10,000,000 systems. Dells aren't built by hand, they're built with machines that snap in RAM and graphics cards. You know what? There's less margin of error that way. What's true for cars is also true for computer manufacturing. And you'll just never get around the economics of economy of scale. Computers now behave like commodity goods. In economics, it means that like kernels of corn you can't tell which one is better -- they're all essentially identical. Yes, Alienware's are different than Dells. But the actual performance of the PC inside the box is virtually identical (assuming all specs are the same) inside whatever brand it is. Anyone disagree?

An Intel 2.0ghz CPU is an Intel 2.0ghz CPU is an Intel 2.0ghz CPU, right? So, how can you reduce the cost of a PC? 1) by buying millions of Intel 2.0ghz CPUs 2) by using your own labor to assemble the computer. That's about it, right? Well, now that computers are pushing toward commodity goods the power of the former is greater than the latter. Meaning that buying millions of CPUs outweighs the cost of Dell (or whomever) buying the infrastructure of robot arms.

Before computers acted like commodity goods, back when there was real competition from Compaq, HP, Gateway 2000, et al it was siginificantly more cast effective to build your own PC. In my eyes, those days are gone, and to ensure they are Dell has upped quality to a really amazing level. (Note again that I am assuming you are buying quality business machines. The consumer ones and the $499 loss leader machines are utter crap).

My argument is about 1/100ths of a percent. I think it's great that you've had stable home built machines, but the real truth (and all data shows this) is that better Dell systems are much more reliable (that really is why they control the huge majority of the market -- high quality, good prices). In my eyes as a professional the difference between 99.999% and 100% reliability can make or break an operation. The arguments above stated that servers worked flawlessly for a few years. That's great, but if you yourself built 10,000 of those servers could you guarantee that success rate? See, Dell builds 100s of millions of PCs and of their quality lines the uptime is truly unparalled. I wasn't trying to say that you can't build a stable home-made box (I've built a little over 100), I'm saying that overall considering the whole spectrum of hand built options versus well-tested Dells (or another reliable company) the mass produced boxes are going to be more stable.