Is pc building a dying trend?

[CPA]

Nobody wants these big behemoths of pcs. We want nice tiddy laptops tablets and phones

Not me. I love my big-ass computer.

 

[T9D]

https://chaturbate.com/female-cams/

 

[mmntech]

Well, you certainly don't save money building anymore. It's a hobby though, but yeah, I can see it shrinking as time goes on. Nobody wants bigass desktops anymore. Most folks can get by using tablets or ultrabooks.

Like a lot of people on here, I like the freedom to select my own parts. Thinking for my next build, I'm going to go for Mini-ITX. I really don't see a need for these huge towers anymore. I've got a steel mid-tower and it's a pain in the butt to move around if you have to work on it. One of my goals for the longest time was to build a dual GPU watercooled system, which I did with my current rig. Time to move on to a more practical gaming setup.

 

[Childs]

I don't have the drive to build PCs like I did 5-10 years ago, but that could be because a build seems to go a lot farther than it used to. Now I just upgrade a component at a time. CPU/MB, then a year or two later upgrade the GPU, then another year or so hard drive, then repeat.

And when I needed another machine I starting buying purpose built solutions, like a Diskstation instead of PC with a raid controller and storage. Steaming box instead of HTPC. Even bought another Mac Mini to consolidate all the services that I had running on different machines. Probably just a sign of getting older.

 

[Eug]

Prebuilt always skimp in to many places. They always have cheap power supplies. And cheap cases. Cheap cooling or very little cooling at all. Unless you want to spend a ton more money. Or some super cheap OEM hard drive. Maybe some cheapo ram. It's always something or a lot of those. The specs sound good on the ad but when you tear it down and look at it you find to many places where they skimp. Which can lead to problems later too. All they care about is the warranty period.

Anyway I really think the future is mini PC sticks. For most people anyway. And eventually they will just have full OS's on the phone that connects to your huge TV or monitor when you get close (or other things like a hard drive and such, and control your home, coffee machines, lights, etc and certain car features from your phone). I know they have some of that already. But it's going to all come together very fast.

Eventually not enough people will be buying separate parts to make it worth it to make them or to expensive for a typical gamer. Everything is going to be all slapped together and all on one chip. Hard drives and ram will eventually merge. We'll only have GPU's and CPU's merged. And all that stuff will be slammed onto that one chip and built into things. (but again most likely just all on a phone)

If anything, you get better quality RAM in pre-built PCs like your average Dell or HP than the average of what's out there aftermarket. Also, personally I'd rather have stable Samsung or Micron RAM than compromise on 3rd party overclocking enthusiast RAM or whatever.

As for the GPU, I want low power but with hardware video decoding and large monitor support. Luckily, that is almost anything out there. Thus, like most, I'm usually happy these days with integrated. The only thing that changes that is Retina, but you get Retina as pre-built solutions anyway.

So, home builds are purely a hobbyist pursuit these days.

 

[rsbennett00]

Prebuilt always skimp in to many places. They always have cheap power supplies. And cheap cases. Cheap cooling or very little cooling at all. Unless you want to spend a ton more money. Or some super cheap OEM hard drive. Maybe some cheapo ram. It's always something or a lot of those. The specs sound good on the ad but when you tear it down and look at it you find to many places where they skimp. Which can lead to problems later too. All they care about is the warranty period.

Anyway I really think the future is mini PC sticks. For most people anyway. And eventually they will just have full OS's on the phone that connects to your huge TV or monitor when you get close (or other things like a hard drive and such, and control your home, coffee machines, lights, etc and certain car features from your phone). I know they have some of that already. But it's going to all come together very fast.

Eventually not enough people will be buying separate parts to make it worth it to make them or to expensive for a typical gamer. Everything is going to be all slapped together and all on one chip. Hard drives and ram will eventually merge. We'll only have GPU's and CPU's merged. And all that stuff will be slammed onto that one chip and built into things. (but again most likely just all on a phone)

I have to say this depends completely on "you get what you pay for". If you are looking at a $300 desktop, then yeah it's going to be crap. It's the same as cars, if you want a brand new car for $8k, guess what the quality will be like compared to something that's like $20k.

 

[Cerb]

It's all proprietary. Never mind it's just a Seagate hard drive. "It's our firmware." You want to replace it, and hope for it to work, you buy our overpriced hard drive.

It's scary, how mean and proprietary these people are (HP, Lenovo, Dell, etc.)

-John

No, any HDD works fine. You must be thinking of things like big vendor SANs, or something, but those are useless without a service contract anyway. Buying PCs or servers, and using your own HDDs/SSDs/RAM is not uncommon for SMBs, as a NBD warranty on parts compares unfavorably to overnight shipping, for all but a total machine failure (let them warranty the board, PSU, case, backplane, whatever--you can afford a new Red, RE, Constellation, or SSD, no sweat, and replace it quickly after business hours).

The proprietary replacements parts are:
1. PSU (Dell uses ATX for most of their towers, though, and HP and Lenovo mix ATX/non-ATX; all are non-ATX for SFF, however).
2. Motherboard (want the in-BIOS Windows Pro key, even if it's ATX).

I build those I own, and sometimes partially build servers (base w/ NBD, add RAM and storage at less than insane costs), but for office/web boxes, it's crazy to do anything more than a minor upgrade of a big OEM box (IE, SSD swapout), and sometimes that works for gaming machines, too.

 

[Arkaign]

Well, you certainly don't save money building anymore. It's a hobby though, but yeah, I can see it shrinking as time goes on. Nobody wants bigass desktops anymore. Most folks can get by using tablets or ultrabooks.

Like a lot of people on here, I like the freedom to select my own parts. Thinking for my next build, I'm going to go for Mini-ITX. I really don't see a need for these huge towers anymore. I've got a steel mid-tower and it's a pain in the butt to move around if you have to work on it. One of my goals for the longest time was to build a dual GPU watercooled system, which I did with my current rig. Time to move on to a more practical gaming setup.

I agree that for run of the mill PCs you save nothing by building. For gaming PCs though, you save a ton by doing it yourself. That's just due to the ludicrous markup and silly buildouts of prebuilt gaming boxes. Some are horrendous value. I looked at the Alienware 'console' PC that was $899 for someone. It was a joke, 2Ghz i7, 2GB Nvidia 860M, 8GB DDR3-1600, 2TB 5400RPM drive, just awful all the way around. Helped that person build a microATX box with SSD, Nvidia 970 4GB, i5 4690K, 2TB 7200RPM storage, etc for the same price. It was slightly bigger, but ridiculously faster.

 

[rsbennett00]

I agree that for run of the mill PCs you save nothing by building. For gaming PCs though, you save a ton by doing it yourself. That's just due to the ludicrous markup and silly buildouts of prebuilt gaming boxes. Some are horrendous value. I looked at the Alienware 'console' PC that was $899 for someone. It was a joke, 2Ghz i7, 2GB Nvidia 860M, 8GB DDR3-1600, 2TB 5400RPM drive, just awful all the way around. Helped that person build a microATX box with SSD, Nvidia 970 4GB, i5 4690K, 2TB 7200RPM storage, etc for the same price. It was slightly bigger, but ridiculously faster.

You can't just look at one prebuilt though, would you just look at one car?

For instance:

HP Z230
I7-4790 quad core 3.6ghz
8gb ram PC3-12800
1TB 7200rpm sata-600
dvdrw
win7 pro
3 year next business day warranty
$815

Add a video card and an SSD.


Versus newegg pricing:
i7 4790 $309
MB MSI H81M-E33 $47
8GB crucial ram $68
random 1TB 7200 rpm drive ~$50
random dvdrw ~$25
random case ~$50
Win7 pro $139

This is already at $688 and missing some things like a power supply. There are also other considerations like noise level. I know first hand that the z230 workstations are basically silent in a noiseless room and the case is big enough to fit a radeon 6990 (12.5"?).

I'm just trying to make the point that not all prebuilt machines are crap to be instantly dismissed when considering a new rig.

 

[MongGrel]

Not me. I love my big-ass computer.

+1

 

[IndyColtsFan]

That's more of a political reason and more dictated by management. Basically the company wants to have an external company to blame if something goes wrong. It's actually really childish, but it's how things work. Rather than custom building everything and getting your IT staff to do... IT work, you have everything prebuilt and setup by contractors/vendors and IT only do the dirty work that revolves around that like connecting the keyboard and mouse, or the typical stuff like backups and system maintenance, and then the rest is all meetings and other management crap. Heck, all the places I worked IT was not even allowed to touch code. Most programming is outsourced these days and they usually have contracts stopping anyone from doing anything in house.

I like Google's approach, most of their stuff is in house, they even use consumer grade hard drives for their server stuff. While some of the vendor stuff like Dell and IBM have crazy warranties that you simply can't get with prebuilt components, they charge so much and lock you into proprietary stuff that you're better off going in-house and just building more redundancy into your system and having more spares.

On other thought, custom building actual PCs for the company would probably be unrealistic unless it's a small company. Servers on the other hand are more realistic as you wont have as many. The biggest issue would be trying to source out parts that are all the same. Go on any site like Newegg and they might have 1-10 of a specific motherboard in stock only, then if you order more you get another revision or completely different motherboard because they only make so many till they change to another model. You simply can't pick a specific motherboard or other component and order 1000+ of them. No sites will have that many in stock or even let you, as a lot of them have limits of how much per person.

You're ignoring many, many costs and factors on why companies don't hire people to custom build PCs and servers. There is a reason companies use specialized vendors and it isn't for political reasons.

 

[Engineer]

Not me. I love my big-ass computer.

We have Big Ass Fans (R)
We have Big Ass Lights (R)

and now....

We have Big Ass Computers (R) (2015 Engineer Inc.)

I love it! :biggrin:

I still build my PC's but haven't done one in some time. Just no energy or need/want to do one right now.

 

[TurtleCrusher]

I hope not. I customized my computer to exact spec and needs. I also use up every single slot I possibly can with (useful) add-on cards. I'm going to hate the proprietary builds that are likely to come.

The ability to add in a DTV tuner, higher-end sound card, mid-range GPU and the ability to pick exactly what RAM/CPU/MOBO that fits your needs... My past two builds (Q8200/3850) and current were exactly what I needed.

 

[Fritzo]

So Neweeg etc are going down for the count?

No, their main business is replacement parts it seems. Also they've diversified into a storefront like Amazon.

 

[TurtleCrusher]

No, their main business is replacement parts it seems. Also they've diversified into a storefront like Amazon.

Which is horridly priced most of the time or just complete junk items. I have the feeling they have high merchant fees.

 

[Cerb]

Which is horridly priced most of the time or just complete junk items. I have the feeling they have high merchant fees.

Worse is filtering. You can't conveniently remove refurbs and such, and have to choose Newegg-only for every category, every time...

 

[BeeBoop]

You save money building high end gaming machines. I made one a few months ago and saved about 1grand mainly because no manufacturer was offering a GTX 980. Alienware offered a titan for 1g at the time and Dell only offered AMD cards, so building saved a lot.

 

[rsbennett00]

I hope not. I customized my computer to exact spec and needs. I also use up every single slot I possibly can with (useful) add-on cards. I'm going to hate the proprietary builds that are likely to come.

The ability to add in a DTV tuner, higher-end sound card, mid-range GPU and the ability to pick exactly what RAM/CPU/MOBO that fits your needs... My past two builds (Q8200/3850) and current were exactly what I needed.

That is truly impressive man. I've never seen someone be able to predict future computing needs so well. My HP tower sucks since it has 6 slots and I'm only using 1.

You save money building high end gaming machines. I made one a few months ago and saved about 1grand mainly because no manufacturer was offering a GTX 980. Alienware offered a titan for 1g at the time and Dell only offered AMD cards, so building saved a lot.

Did you look into buying a prebuilt without a video card and popping in a 980? So few people think about that. It's not an all or nothing world out there.

 

[TurtleCrusher]

That is truly impressive man. I've never seen someone be able to predict future computing needs so well. My HP tower sucks since it has 6 slots and I'm only using 1.

Sounds like you had a bad day homie.

 

[alcoholbob]

You don't build for price anymore. You build for customization, and fun.

Pretty much. In fact for the same performance often times its way more expensive now to build it yourself than wait for a Dell sale. The only advantage is if you want to hit a particular cooling goal or a custom noise level, or chose a case that you like the look of.

A built a 0db HTPC for like $1100 with off the parts off Amazon earlier this year...I think its about as fast as a $300 Dell Inspiron PC lol.

 

[Eug]

Pretty much. In fact for the same performance often times its way more expensive now to build it yourself than wait for a Dell sale. The only advantage is if you want to hit a particular cooling goal or a custom noise level, or chose a case that you like the look of.

A built a 0db HTPC for like $1100 with off the parts off Amazon earlier this year...I think its about as fast as a $300 Dell Inspiron PC lol.

Interestingly, a lot of the cheap Dells and the like are extremely quiet now, another reason I'm willing to buy off the shelf. Hell, even my $399 Acer slim desktop I bought way back when is uber quiet. Part of the reason is OEMs have gotten those small power supplies dialed in with small fans, and they work fine. Sure they're lowish wattage and they won't power top of the line GPUs, but since most people these days don't care about top of the line GPUs, that doesn't matter. Another part of the reason is that for most users, CPU manufacturers (esp. Intel) have produced chips that are more powerful than is necessary. For most standard consumers all you need robust surfing, email, and business app compatibility, with light gaming, which is something just about any desktop CPU can accomplish these days, with relatively low power. Hence, the CPU fans can be small and quiet.

Similarly, my 27" iMac with Core i7 is also essentially silent, aside from the hard drive. That is solved with the new models, which can be configured with SSDs.

And then there's the Atom nettop machine for $300 I bought which is silent. Well, it had a laptop drive in it. It become completely silent when I swapped in an SSD. A similar machine in 2015 would likely run fine as a low end desktop using Broadwell or something along with an SSD.

 

[rsbennett00]

Sounds like you had a bad day homie.

Yeah, sorry, weekends are so shitty. I hate having days off work.

 

[alcoholbob]

Yeah, sorry, weekends are so shitty. I hate having days off work.

Sounds like the solution is to work on the weekends!

 

[rsbennett00]

Sounds like the solution is to work on the weekends!

If I were to go to the office, there's no one else there, so.... I wish but alas...

 

[BeeBoop]

That is truly impressive man. I've never seen someone be able to predict future computing needs so well. My HP tower sucks since it has 6 slots and I'm only using 1.



Did you look into buying a prebuilt without a video card and popping in a 980? So few people think about that. It's not an all or nothing world out there.

I would never consider a prebuilt from Dell or any other name brand because the parts might not fit, PSU might not have enough power, or something I haven't thought off. A prebuilt from Newegg might work though since the motherboard model and psu is listed.