i think the prices you listed were on the high-end of retail; they are paying whole sale prices (to begin with) which are well below low-end retail prices; where are below the high-end retail prices you list. Yes warranty does cost money but that begs the question if they will cover the warranty of the parts (such as gpu) or expect you to deal with the actual manufact. To be honest Corsair is a decent company so will likely provide good warranty service (if needed). Still I think anything over $2000 is way too much and $1600-$1800 is actually where this box should be selling. I guess one last argument for a higher price point might be it is a limited item (low sales); and certainly at that price point sales will be very low.
e-tail margins on pricey components like CPUs and GPUs are usually in the region of 4-6% (at least here in Norway), due to intense competition. As such, the difference between wholesale and retail prices are near negligible. Most stores survive through vendor-specific deals, volume and margins on accessories (which is why humle SATA and USB cables always seem to cost shocking amounts, and it's far easier to find great deals on keyboards than CPUs). Nearly all sales, rebates and promotions are incentivised by suppliers and/or manufacturers, as those are the ones with any margins to speak of. Of course, nothing is stopping Corsair from getting deals like this for their parts - which I assume they have (unless they want to eat the entire R&D cost for this thing through negligible sales margins).
As for warranties, you buy a single product, a Corsair PC. You have no customer relation to, say, Intel (CPU) or MSI (GPU, mobo) from buying this. If Corsair tried to shift the warranties onto them, that would be a
huge letdown.
When it comes to pricing, this thing is actually pretty reasonable. Most well-designed (truly) SFF cases retail at $200-300 (Ncase M1 and the like). As
@DaveSimmons mentioned above, even for the highest-end version this is pretty reasonably priced. Two 240mm AIO pump-rad setups (even slim ones) is $200, though you can probably subtract $30 or so from only having one fan (though the ML fans are rather pricey). The Corsair SF450 and SF600 PSUs are $150 and $200 respectively on Newegg (
@Azuma Hazuki ). From DaveSimmons' prices, that's ~$2000 before adding the case (with the SF450), and easily $2300 including the SF600 (arguably necessary to run a 1080Ti) and a case. $400 for assembly of a PC in this size and preformance class, R&D of not only the case but the entire cooling setup, custom short power cables, DP+HDMI extenders and a 2-year whole-product warranty? That's pretty decent. Not a bad markup at all. Not to mention: that includes not only Corsair's margins, but the distributors' and (r)etailers' margins as well.
If I had that kind of cash and was in the market for a whole PC, I wouldn't think twice about buying this. I'd probably want an m.2 SSD, but at least the motherboard has the slot for one, and it would probably drive the price past $3000, which makes for bad marketing.
. Certainly the box of parts do-it-yourself cost should be around $2,000 not $2,700.
Facebook
Twitter