Pros and Cons with Building a PC

[Imaginer]

It is really hard sometimes to find articles on the Internet by searching that are up to date. A lot of computer parts retailers often have articles that are a little out of date.

For general component selection, it can be daunting and some sources are out of date.

That doesn't mean the basic practices, discipline, and troubleshooting mindset isn't valid. Things now are the same as back then - CPU, memory, motherboard, add on cards, and drives are pretty much the same as back then. There are different in standards today that are modern for the computing demand and environment versus back then but the basic principles still apply.

Hell, most component connectors PREVENT you from inserting things the wrong way. From the CPU socket, to SATA, they are all one way, fit with ease in cable and parts.

One has to weigh the needed capability of components and follow what platforms and standards to follow in supporting the components.

 

[MongGrel]

Even for being cheap I don't like a few of the components in there, why it's cheap.

The PSU for starters.

I'd never one myself, but that's just me maybe.

 

[Imaginer]

One more thing of note. It has been A LONG WHILE since I posted a need for help with a PC problem (the very reason why I joined Anandtech forums to begin with). The PC assembly process, troubleshooting, and software installation has just become that good for me that only very outlying problems for general situations would be addressed.

 

[Imaginer]

Even for being cheap I don't like a few of the components in there, why it's cheap.

The PSU for starters.

I'd never one myself, but that's just me maybe.

That right there is one of the biggest potential failures of a new PC. Not sizing your supply to the total connected hardware to it with some percentage over for insurance (not just the ones inside the case with the boards, cards, chips and drives but the periphery in some cases).

And not selecting a power supply that can work in cooling itself with the case it is placed in.

But another factor, is the maintenance over time, biggest thing being dust which I am sure many in this forum may have witnessed over time.

 

[MongGrel]

That and it's made by CWT.

The size really isn't too bad for what's in it, but still.

 

[lucklessgorath]

The peace of mind you get with the warranty on a pre-built PC is so much better then building one yourself. With the pre-built you get one year warranty on parts. Very straight forward. A year is a good long time on a warranty too so you know you are covered if something goes bad.

If I were to custom build this same exact PC I had to go though all this trouble to look up the warranties offered from the various manufactures. I get;
5 years for the case.
3 years on the PSU, CPU, GPU & motherboard.
2 years for hard drive.
1 year for the CD/DVD drive.
And lifetime on the RAM.

I can see that the one year warranty for the pre-built is such a good deal.

 

[lehtv]

The peace of mind you get with the warranty on a pre-built PC is so much better then building one yourself. With the pre-built you get one year warranty on parts. Very straight forward. A year is a good long time on a warranty too so you know you are covered if something goes bad.

If I were to custom build this same exact PC I had to go though all this trouble to look up the warranties offered from the various manufactures. I get;
5 years for the case.
3 years on the PSU, CPU, GPU & motherboard.
2 years for hard drive.
1 year for the CD/DVD drive.
And lifetime on the RAM.

I can see that the one year warranty for the pre-built is such a good deal.

You're probably being sarcastic? (Sarcasm never transmits well over teh interwebs.) I would pick longer warranties for individual components every time.

In addition, you could purposefully pick products that have longer than normal warranties, e.g. PSU with 5-7 years, WD Black hard disk with 5 years, ASUS Sabertooth with 5 years.

 

[crashtech]

May I be more succinct about the #1 Pro? It's FUN to build your own PC, if you are so inclined. That's really the only REAL reason not to pay for a pre-configured machine these days. Those who are strictly looking to save money really shouldn't apply, nor should those who are not mechanically/technically inclined.

 

[lehtv]

Usually, those who are looking to save money should apply, because it actually does save money (also keep in mind the longer warranties). Also, you don't have to be technically inclined to build a PC, just like you don't have to be technically inclined to put together a piece of IKEA furniture.

 

[Morbus]

There's also the reason that, if you own a machine you've built (or at least hand picked the parts for), it's a much better ownership... It's something you've picked specifically for you, and not just some marketing-drive pile of hardware that you just happened to find at a convenient price at your local mall... I mean, I very VERY rarely see a balanced pre-built machine, it either has heinously large amounts of RAM, a very weak CPU, a crappy motherboard, you name it. Every single one of them I could improve considerably by just using the budget better.

But then again, there's people who like the "peace of mind" of buying pre-built. Much in the same way that there's people who like the "peace of mind" of having a technician swap the lightbulbs, because they've heard that will make the lighbulbs last longer. I don't blame those people, but I can't help but feel superior to them.

Cause I just am.

Custom builds for the win, really.

 

[crashtech]

Usually, those who are looking to save money should apply, because it actually does save money (also keep in mind the longer warranties). Also, you don't have to be technically inclined to build a PC, just like you don't have to be technically inclined to put together a piece of IKEA furniture.

That's true when everything goes right. I'll leave it to you and others to calculate the odds of that, save to say that in the wrong hands, I've seen otherwise seemingly simple and benign hardware become monstrously problematic, starting with the damage-prone LGA socket itself.

 

[Blue_Max]

Pro: HUGE amount of choice selection and prices to hunt for what you need and bargain-hunt.

Con: You can waste a ton of time researching to death and STILL get crummy components or pay too much, etc.
One small slip-up during assembly can result in no-boot, BSOD, or even frying of parts.

 

[ignatzatsonic]

I get the sense that a smaller percentage of forum members are building compared to 5 or 10 years ago. Not sure of all the reasons, but there was a time when the amount you saved by building was considerably higher than it is now. The average PC in the late 1990s probably cost 2k. I knew someone who paid 7k for a Dell laptop around 1995. That's gotta be the equivalent of 9 or 10k now.

The con of getting junk and bloatware in the OEM products can be avoided by simply doing a clean install the day after the thing arrives. I know from reading various forums that many OEM buyers don't know that--let alone that they have a recovery partition and can make recovery disks.

I'd expect building to become increasingly uncommon as the desktop continues to wane. I wonder how many 20 or 25 year olds have no significant experience with a desktop? They are unlikely to ever build. I have no idea what you see in schools today.

I first built out of intellectual curiosity. I remember quizzing a total stranger for 30 minutes in a PC store trying to get up the courage--this was before forums like this.

 

[mikeymikec]

It ought to be more expensive to build it yourself. Assuming that a supplier is building the exact spec you want in bulk, they'll be getting bulk prices, and they'd have to be stupid not to hand down some of that savings to the customer, because most big-name PC suppliers mainly compete on cost.

Having said that, sometimes it is cheaper to build it yourself. Some suppliers really add on some serious $$ when the customer says that they want a really good PC. I once found that a higher-end PC I spec'd up was £400 cheaper than its Dell counterpart (ie. same CPU, same gfx, etc), and I don't skimp on the cost of anything (except possibly the case).

I prefer to build it myself. My reason (and what I say to my customers) is this - when an average person goes on an average website or into the average shop selling a computer, the computer's spec will list the basics: CPU, RAM capacity, HDD size. The devil is in the details. A good quality board will probably last longer than a cheap one (and give greater upgrade potential, though in my experience the average person upgrades little). A properly spec'd PSU is likely to last as long as one needs it to, whereas a PSU that someone skimped on the budget with is somewhat more likely to fail in say 3-5 years. One can also pick up pretty long warranties on components when self-building, as opposed to the normal standard legal minimum that most PC suppliers will offer.

If you're a PC building newbie, get a more experienced friend to help you (with spec'ing and building). Failing that, ask for lots of advice, ask for possibly a how-to video on PC building (I bet there are some numskulls on YouTube who do how-to videos and do horrendously risky things, or who do things in the wrong order that creates more work later or makes everything take a lot longer). Also, expect to have some trouble when building, like say "you forgot to plug in the power switch connector". I'd say in the first thirty or forty PC builds I did, there was almost always some silly mistake I had made. I used to joke that if I hadn't inadvertently cut myself on the insides of a (by today's standards) old PC case during a build, then the blood sacrifice hadn't been offered and I'd have teething problems with it

 

[code65536]

I wouldn't even call it "building"--assembly is a better term.

I'd even say it's easier than assembling furniture--with furniture, you have to follow the manual because it's not always self-evident which hole should be aligned and which screw you are supposed to use for each segment. With computer hardware, it's visually self-evident how things are supposed to go together--the connectors are all sized and shaped such that there is only one way to plug them in. It's like an exercise where a toddler matches together objects of different shapes.

The hard part is deciding what parts to get--do I want an i3 or an i5, how much RAM, which of these hundred different PSU offers to get, etc. The actual assembly is far easier than trying to put together the typical some-assembly-required furniture.


Then again, many years ago, I caught an episode of some reality show where contestants were struggling to set up a new Dell desktop computer (which really only involved plugging in color-coded mouse, keyboard, VGA, audio, and power cables), so maybe I shouldn't give too much credit to humanity...

 

[Morbus]

I'd expect building to become increasingly uncommon as the desktop continues to wane. I wonder how many 20 or 25 year olds have no significant experience with a desktop? They are unlikely to ever build. I have no idea what you see in schools today.

Well, certainly more than you had a few years back! 10 years ago I didn't know many 20 or 25 year olds who had significant experience with a computer, let alone a desktop.

I'd expect the more the desktop wanes (or plateaus, more like), the more people will build custom machines. I mean, if the market has more "hardcore" costumers than "softcore" ones, isn't it normal that a bigger chunk will custom build?

 

[mikeymikec]

Continuing Morbus's point, I suspect that most 20-25 year olds have had significant experience with a desktop through the workplace as well as from school.

Most office-type environments as well as schools would have to be stupid to abandon desktops in favour of mobile equipment (where the mobile side of things isn't a requirement / highly desirable), simply because of the amount of issues that stem from mobile use, or other factors like poor posture relating to long-term laptop use.

I'm surprised that mini ITX hasn't made a bigger dent in the desktop market share (thinking about businesses and schools here), though technically still a desktop.

 

[Morbus]

It ought to be more expensive to build it yourself. Assuming that a supplier is building the exact spec you want in bulk, they'll be getting bulk prices, and they'd have to be stupid not to hand down some of that savings to the customer, because most big-name PC suppliers mainly compete on cost.

That logic is very nice and fine, but what are the chances of finding the perfect machine?

As I said before, I have never seen a well balanced pre-built. And by that I mean a pre-built
with a spec-list that I would chose. For anyone, not just me.

Checking my local store yields me absolutely nothing close to the performance of my machine for the same price. For the same price (about 1200€) I get the same basic setup (i5, GTX760), but craptastic RAM, craptastic case and PSU, craptastic motherboard, no HDD (just a 128GB Plextor SSD - seriously?) and no OS... And the page says it can be overlocked but it can't, because it's an H87 motherboard on a non-K CPU...

I would need to spend 400€ more to get something comparable (half the RAM but an i7 IB instead). And that, in my book, is idiotic.

And if you ramp up the price, you get even less for your money. For a whooping 3.5K, you get Asus RAMPAGE IV Extreme, 3930k, 500GB 840 EVO, WD 4TB HDD, 4x8GB Kingston HyperX 2133Mhz CL11 and an Asus GTX780. I'm sorry, that's too expensive for that setup. I would save at least 1000€ on that if I built it myself. Never mind that I would never pick those parts if I had that kind of money to spend on a gaming machine.

And this is from the cheapest shop in the country (Portugal), and we have prices a bit higher than the rest of Europe, but not really that much.

This is robbing the clients blind.

And guess what: with custom builds I get the PEACE OF MIND that if I open the tower, I don't void the warranty.

 

[mikeymikec]

Morbus, I'm not advocating that people shouldn't self-build, I self-build as part of my business I'm just trying to be fair and balanced in my advice.

I have seen some decent big name builds. Mesh Computers in the UK certainly used to. They had some financial trouble recently though, I think they're under new management. I haven't seen any of their builds for a few years now, but in most of the ones I've seen, they had decent brand medium-high range boards and I can't think of any that died before their time. They did however build a cheap and nasty range as well which I think isn't morally right, either you can build something right or don't bother at all is my feeling. Other two brands that have since gone under which built decent machines were Dan Technologies and Evesham Micro (IIRC).

Yup, the reason why one should self-build is that one has done the research to find out the good components/brands to use and got exactly what one wants, as opposed to a compromise based on what a big-name PC supplier stocks.

Morbus, I already posted here:
http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=36187912&postcount=39

 

[richaron]

My PC is not just a computer. I have 4 Noctua filtered PWM intakes (still playing with profiles) in a Lian-Li case. NH-D14 running passive with 2mm clearance over 4*4G UC/UV RAM and zero clearance from side panel. Date matched WD reds from before release. Slimeline slot loading BR burner & 3.5" USB 3.0 card reader crammed in my only 5.25" bay.

Pro is not to impress people, nor save a few dollars (tho both can have value). Pro is to build something OEMs will never see a profitable market in. Sometimes to build something I love.

 

[crashtech]

...to build something I love.

That's it, right there. Passion, enthusiasm, fun. It's not for everyone, but a worthy pursuit for those who enjoy it. I think all users with any technical inclination should try building at least once to see if the bug bites.

 

[paul878]

You don't build your own PC to save money, you build because you want to.