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About LinkBacksRead more.Or do you always build your own?
Read more.Or do you always build your own?
I have always built my own for the enjoyment and self education..
Only once, not long after I switched to PC's from my extensively modified Amiga 1200 (towered, 603e PPC accelerator with the Blizzard vision GPU), a Packard Bell with the first 1GHz K7 Athlon CPU. Cracking little machine to be honest and served me well. After that I built my own.
I always build my own PC because I can pick the parts I want within my budget and color/theme. With prebuilts you may end up getting questionable quality parts. You can still take a full day making your build look clean and neat, or sloppy if you want to finish fast (30 mins).
I typically build my own - i've only ever bought a pre-built once, and that was back in 2008 when I bought a Mac Pro (and promptly put windows on it) as it was over £500 cheaper to do so than to buy all the parts individually.
Granted it was a specialist case as I wanted a dual Xeon machine given my workload at the time wasn't entirely gaming (I did spec it with an 8800GT though, as it was also used for gaming).
Since then it's been cheaper to source my own parts and build myself - so i've gone back to that approach and will likely continue...but the main driver for me is the cost more than anything else.
I have promised myself I will do a hard line watercooling build next time though, which does make me nervous enough that I would consider going pre-made...at least until you look up the cost of pre-mades with hard line cooling
My first PC was a pre-built Mesh around 20 years ago, the second was a custom build from Kustom PC. Since then I've built my own with the aim of achieving the quietest system I can get using quality cooling and psu from Noctua & Seasonic. The case (Silverstone FT01) has remained since the first build. That press brake bent aluminium unibody is fabrication art!
Always built my own for choice, price and the enjoyment of it. These days both choice and price have gone as nothing is in stock or if it is then it's way above RRP so I might actually consider buying pre-built if I were in the market for a new machine.
Other than my first few machines from way-way back, I've built my own machines, except when I need 'an computer' without any specific requirements, e.g. games or budget, I just hop on to Ebay and get an ex-corporate Dell or some such desktop. Deadly reliable and easy to sell on without losing much value or having to break it apart to sell as components.
My first pc was a prebuilt Time Machine, in my defence it was bought as a home office machine
When starting out I bought a pre-built machine from Evesham Mircos. I did later install a 486 CPU on it. The only other time was a Dell and I really regretted doing that.
My next PC will probably be a pre-built one though. I need to upgrade everything and it seems the only way to actually get the components that I want. I was hoping for a new Ryzen on the AM5 socket but that might be more than a year away.
My very first PC was pre-built - that was a 486dx66 from Escom - but I added the soundcard and extra stick of RAM myself rather than have them added to the base model by the shop.
Every desktop since then, and there have been many, has been home-built.
Not since the very early 1990s when I brought a 486 SX25 based system (later upgraded to a 486 DX4)? Since then all my PC's have been built by me. My younger brother did by a Pentium 166 MMX prebuilt system a few years later, but even since then I've built his and his family's PCs.
No chance, my aged father once did, he was distraught when I showed him how much he overpayed.
The build process has always been fairly simple, the rewarding part comes from the tidy cable management and it actually working when you press the power buttonThe simplification of various components is such that the build process arguably isn't as rewarding as it once was - what used to feel like a day-long operation can now be completed in 30 minutes flat - and with the advantage of buying in bulk, system integrators often offer base units at price points that individuals will struggle to match.
I've considered buying a prebuilt but never have, that's purely down to component choice as well as warranties on individual components exceeding anything offered on a prebuilt PC. Price wise there isn't enough to justify sacrificing on the component choices. If those component choices as well as warranties were there without extra costs involved above and beyond someone building and testing it all works (and shipping) for a nominal amount I'd be more inclined to go down the prebuilt route, as long as it was from a trusted source.
I'd certainly never consider a Dell etc though, I've had to deal with those poor choices made by family members in the past (which is why I now build theirs to their budget and usage scenarios).
Nope. However,at the rate component prices such as GPUs are going up,its cheaper to buy a prebuilt system.
For me, no. I've recommended them to others though. While most are either overpriced for the parts or oddly unbalanced (great GPU with a terrible CPU or vice versa,) there are some decent systems out there.
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