Is this worth it?

[Goose]

Hi,

My friend wants to buy a new PC thats already built up, but a high end gaming machine. He found this one, and as the shop is nearby, he wants to get it:

Link

I am just wondering if anybody knows of a better place he could get it for a better price?

Ideally he wants to play Crysis on full or near full settings.

Thanks a lot
Goose

[aidanjt]

No, that's completely ****, you can do much better for 1.5K

[NightshadowUK]

19" widescreen with an 8800 Ultra, hahahaha!

Don't do it, they obviously know nothing.

[usxhe190]

that is pretty expensive
if you buy from them, you are getting ripped off...

[LegacyOne]

At the very most there making £200 but that's what you get for a already built PC. That said the setup looks good with DDR3 which is why its a bit expensive.

[aidanjt]

It's a completely unbalanced system, you can easily do better for less. And DDR3 is rubbish in priceerformance.

[Rosaline]

Even allowing for the need for a business to make a profit, I'd suggest that the system is overpriced by around £100 (rough figure by mental estimation), and strangely designed in other respects (such as DDR3 ram, the P5KC motherboard and only a 19 inch monitor - and arguably, a 8800GTX Ultra may be considered a bit odd, given it's high price).

Probably the best idea for him is to get your friend to take a look at scan and their 3XS systems. The great thing about scan is that if you can't see a prebuilt system which matches your needs, you can phone their sales lines and ask them to build a custom system for you.

[staffsMike]

To give you an Idea I built this for someone a couple of months back,

Q6600 2.4GHz with Scythe Ninja HSF
4GB RAM (ballistix)
8800GTS 640MB (£150 less than an 8800 ULTRA..)
Antec P182
2 x 500GB Western Digital AAKS Hard Drives
Abit !P-35
Corsair 520W PSU
2 x Samsung 22" Monitors
Vista Ultimate 64bit

..for just under £1500

You could trade the two screens for one 24" and an 8800GTX and have a beast of a PC.

Tell him not to waste his money and either get someone like scan to build it..or just build it himself.

[Saracen]

.....

Tell him not to waste his money and either get someone like scan to build it..or just build it himself.

Not everybody wants to, or is capable of building a PC themselves.

Besides, there are good reasons for buying a pre-built PC and also good reasons for buying from a local shop. Among the reasons for buying a pre-built PC is that if something goes wrong, it's that much harder for the supplier to blame someone else by blaming a piece of hardware they didn't supply.

Similarly, if you order a PC by mail-order, then you've got the hassle of dealing with a courier delivery, and if anything goes wrong, the hassle (and delay) of arranging courier pickup and redelivery. If you've got a job which makes being at home to take courier deliveries hard, then it can be a considerable disincentive to buying other than at a local shop.

Then, there's the ability to build a relationship with a small local business that just doesn't exist with a large mail-order outfit. For instance, I've been buying car hifis from the same small, local company for nearly 30 years. Can I get the gear cheaper by mail-order? Hell, yes. Will I do so? Nope. Because I've had excellent service and backup from that local company in the past, and am prepared to pay a premium to get it again in the future. The same applies to buying cameras. And so on.

Whether any of this applies to Goose's mate is anybody's guess, but that system is not, by my arithmetic, anything remotely resembling a rip-off. It's just not a rock-bottom price either. And not everybody is looking for rock-bottom price.

As for whether it's well-balanced, that's another issue. The P5KC might not be everybody's choice, but not everybody is looking for a board for overclocking. I'm not, for a start. And if you're not, that board provides a reasonable range of features without attracting premium pricing. Couple that with DDR3, a fairly high-end processor and an 8800Ultra and you should have a machine with a respectable performance.

I wouldn't spec a machine that way, but then again, it's not me buying it.

If Goose's friend wants to buy the bits and build himself, he could perhaps get a better overall spec and save some money .... but he may not want to do that.

[aidanjt]

Not everybody wants to, or is capable of building a PC themselves.

Besides, there are good reasons for buying a pre-built PC and also good reasons for buying from a local shop. Among the reasons for buying a pre-built PC is that if something goes wrong, it's that much harder for the supplier to blame someone else by blaming a piece of hardware they didn't supply.

Similarly, if you order a PC by mail-order, then you've got the hassle of dealing with a courier delivery, and if anything goes wrong, the hassle (and delay) of arranging courier pickup and redelivery. If you've got a job which makes being at home to take courier deliveries hard, then it can be a considerable disincentive to buying other than at a local shop.

Then, there's the ability to build a relationship with a small local business that just doesn't exist with a large mail-order outfit. For instance, I've been buying car hifis from the same small, local company for nearly 30 years. Can I get the gear cheaper by mail-order? Hell, yes. Will I do so? Nope. Because I've had excellent service and backup from that local company in the past, and am prepared to pay a premium to get it again in the future. The same applies to buying cameras. And so on.

Whether any of this applies to Goose's mate is anybody's guess, but that system is not, by my arithmetic, anything remotely resembling a rip-off. It's just not a rock-bottom price either. And not everybody is looking for rock-bottom price.

As for whether it's well-balanced, that's another issue. The P5KC might not be everybody's choice, but not everybody is looking for a board for overclocking. I'm not, for a start. And if you're not, that board provides a reasonable range of features without attracting premium pricing. Couple that with DDR3, a fairly high-end processor and an 8800Ultra and you should have a machine with a respectable performance.

I wouldn't spec a machine that way, but then again, it's not me buying it.

If Goose's friend wants to buy the bits and build himself, he could perhaps get a better overall spec and save some money .... but he may not want to do that.

That doesn't alter the fact that it was built by a monkey, a very stupid monkey at that.

[Saracen]

That doesn't alter the fact that it was built by a monkey, a very stupid monkey at that.

Instead of just giving a bald assertion that it's rubbish, how about giving Goose some comments as to why it's built by a monkey. It might help him more.

[staffsMike]

I'd be interested to see what the company actually looks like. The site is actually very nice and they offer lots of nice services so they might not be as bas as I first thought.

It's hard to think how other people might think sometimes as we know exactly what we can get for the money and they don't. On second glance it's not a terrible PC for the money when you consider it's all in. The spec is still very odd and I certainly wouldn't buy it, or even recommend it to a friend but as sacacen has said..it's not all about what you're buying or how much it costs..where it's from needs to be considered just as much.

You pays your money you make your choice. Scan certainly aren't cheap either but you know what you're getting.

What I would suggest is getting your mate to pop down comet.. you can now order mesh PC's there which are very good and you can take it back to comet (I assume) when it goes wrong

If he is capable of building the PC himself or someone he knows can..you for example then it might be an idea to do a build for himself. Most of the things you buy have a warranty in the region of 3 years to lifetime so it's actually protected for a lot longer than the 2 years you will get with the local company.

[aidanjt]

Instead of just giving a bald assertion that it's rubbish, how about giving Goose some comments as to why it's built by a monkey. It might help him more.

Sure, specing an 8800Ultra suggest a gamers rig, with that in mind, 4GB of RAM is becoming increasingly nessecery with newer titles, you can get 4GB of DDR2 for much less than 2GB of DDR3. A Quad core CPU is also becoming more important than MegaHurtz for games, a Q6600 costs around the same as an E6850. An 8800Ultra is a) overkill, b) nowhere near going to be pressured by a 19" widescreeen. The case is flimsy, the optical drive is not user serviceable in case of a fault. Here's a spec I slapped together that's more ballanced, offers better core performance, and is cheaper:

Lian-Li PC V1000 PLUS Aluminium Midi-Tower - Black
Saitek Eclipse 2 Illuminated Keyboard - Blue/Red/Purple
Samsung SM-223BW 22" Widescreen LCD Monitor - Glossy Black
BFG GeForce 8800 GTX OC 768MB GDDR3 HDTV/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail
Corsair VX 450W ATX PSU (CMPSU-450VXUK)
Samsung SH-S203BEBN 20x20 DVD±RW Dual Layer Serial ATA ReWriter (Black) - OEM
Western Digital Caviar SE16 500GB SATA-II 16MB Cache - OEM
GeIL 4GB (2x2GB) PC6400C5 800MHz Black Dragon DDR2 Dual Channel Kit
Abit IP35 Pro (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard
Intel Core 2 Quad Pro Q6600 G0 2.40GHz (1066FSB) - Retail
Logitech G5 Gaming-Grade Laser Mouse - Retail

Which comes in at ~£1355

[Saracen]

Good post, aidanjt.

I'm not sure that, generally, I'd agree with some of the points, but I'm not that much of a gamer and it may well be true in that context. In particular, I'd query the raw grunt of the Q6600 as opposed to the E6850. IMHO, the Q6600 won't show it's true potential unless you have applications written to take advantage of more than two cores and, currently, few are. As to whether games are or not, I've no idea so I'll leave that one to you gamers. Maybe it's a lot more common in games than I was aware, or maybe there's enough coming down the line to justify it.

DDR3 is, from what I can make out, of relatively little current real-world benefit, at least until and unless up-coming motherboard technologies make better use if it. But, that seems like a strange reason for putting it on a motherboard like that. And certainly, not me, it seems to offer particularly poor price-performance, unless you have a very carefully spec'd machine designed to squeeze every last drop of power from it, and that machine certainly isn't so-designed. It seems like a very strange choice.

The optical drive may not be user serviceable, but as Goose said, his mate wants a pre-built PC and it seems distinctly possible that having things user-serviceable is not on his mate's radar.

The Ultra might make sense, if the next step, when funds permit, is to upgrade the screen to a Dell 24" HC, or whatever. In other words, buying with some future-proofing in mind. After all, it's easier to add a new monitor than to change graphics cards, especially if you're not PC literate.


At the end of the day, you can certainly buy bits that would, in both your and my opinion, provide a better balanced and better value PC. But Goose's mate doesn't want to buy the bits and build. He wants to buy a ready-built PC. So unless he's prepared to change that view, we'd be better helping Goose by commenting on alternative sources and specs of gaming PCs than by giving a component list.

While it may not be the approach that most of the people frequenting a site like HEXUS would adopt, wanting a ready-built single-source PC is a perfectly rational approach and many people will be prepared to pay a premium to have the work done for them, and a single place to take the whole thing back to if it goes wrong.


So for Goose, I'd say two questions come to mind :-

1) Is your mate determined to buy pre-built, or would a component list be of interest?

2) Is he prepared to buy mail-order, or is a local shop a priority? If it is, there's good reasons for that but it does imply that choice will do down and price will go up. If your mate is happy with that, for the kind of reason I mentioned earlier, then fair enough.

[aidanjt]

Well as others have mentioned, Scan offer the service of building the system for you from provided specifications, that's covered by guarantee. Also, on Quad-core, more and more games are leveraging SMP programming techniques to use multi-core machines more efficiently.

[Gazcoop]

Im in the same boat i know what i want, but dont want the hassle/ nightmare of building it and want somewhere to go if it all go's wrong

Will Scan build too my spec ?? and how much do they charge ??