and that's the rub. I find that MOST people who are willing to spend big bucks on an awesome gaming PC are enthusiast's and want to do the building themselves.
Yeah, that's... part of my marketing problem, in attempting to sell PCs.
Face Facts: When it comes to PC - your average Joe has ridiculous expectations. They want their shit to work out of the box - and the fact that it isn't blazing fast in 6 years is unacceptable to them. These are the bottom rung of the market. Avoid it. They don't want to pay for a new computer, even though they have reached their end of life - so they want YOU to fix it for pennies. These are NOT the kind of people you should do business with. Period.
I was trying to undercut the big OEMs...
at the low end (GASP!), with custom-built boxes, and you're pretty spot-on with some of my customers. They would call weekly, "hey, my computer is "pausing". (Is it your internet? Is it your HDD? Is it your CPU overheating? TBH, at one point, an older SATA HDD that I bought used from someone here on the forums, eventually bit the dust in their PC as a secondary storage HDD, and WAS causing "freezing". Took a long time to diagnose and figure out what they meant by "pausing", because they didn't describe it well, and it wasn't blatently obvious. When the drive finally kicked the bucket, and the desktop was freezing for seconds at a time, which is what Windows likes to do when a SATA device isn't responding, is when we figured it out.)
The best though, was when I got someone a new monitor (well, new to them, it was purchased from a local recycler for cheap, and given to them for free). They claimed that it slowed down their PC. It was a 4:3 LCD. So I got them a wide-screen, and they went back to being happy.
I've never heard of a monitor, actually "slowing down" a PC, but best that I can figure is, because of the aspect ratio, more vertical space was being shown on their web sites that they frequented, and therefore, more web content was on-screen at once, therefore, more scripts were running, etc., more videos, etc., and slowed down a little. But this person is, IMHO, a bit hyper-sensitive to lag. (A "Competitive Gamer".)
I mean, do mainstream PC makers (HP, Dell, etc.) these days even sell watercooling and cool cases?
Sadly, they do. They charge a high enough price for them, that it may be possible to slide a precisely-budgeted budget gamer build with some bells 'n whistles in under that price, but it's increasingly not worthwhile (for the small-time builder).
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