What are todays opinions of pre-built systems vs custom built by yourself?

I have not ever had a store-bought machine because all of mine have either been custom designed in the early days to my specification and all since then have been built by me. However I have been to other people's houses who have big name desktop machines and they have always been slow with seemingly cheap components. Such as a good graphics card but it is the cheapest of the cheap version where it has no casing around it and has a weak fan.

Is this a typical thing that store bought means not as good? I personally just like to know exactly what goes into my machine so I always just build my own. I bet it is cheaper too, but I am interested in your opinions.

Always custom build it's really not hard Youtube is your friend.

I sometimes go into Dixons or Currys, just to laugh at their prebuilt specs and the asking prices!

I started out on a cheap-ish self-build, but quickly realised that I could spend a bit more to get FAR more... and I would get lots of pritty pritty lights with it, too!!

They are generally cheaper, and you get to pick components that suit your usage best. Of course this comes at a price which is your time (which probably doesn't take a long time for some).

All you got to do is look at the prices of the pre built from the likes of scan and overclockers that should scare you for life. Did one for the neighbour the other day and then he asked about the warranty of the parts, he said just because of the warranty like the psu from corsair 7yrs he would rather have a personally built one. Cyrus well awful try and sell you a two year warranty on top of it

I don't think anything has changed.

If you want to buy really cheap, then you can't beat a pre-built machine on cost and it was never going to be quick anyway.
If you want good, then for example at work we use the Dell Xeon based workstations and they really are very good and the corporate support tends to be superb.

For home use for anything in the middle, self build gets you a better machine in the short term and something that you can give mid life bumps to in the medium term.

I've only had one pre-built PC (not including laptops!) and this was a nighmare to upgrade as it used a proprietary PSU, but the only reason I bought it was it was end of line and the entire system including Vista OS, keyboard and mouse came to less than the price of buying a full retail version of Vista and the CPU as a retail box version.

I built all of my other PCs myself and quite a few for friends and family.

I think both have their place. At the low end the economies of scale usually mean that pre-built is cheaper, at the very high end there are advantages to a pre-built too. In the middle it's not necessarily much cheaper to self build but you don't get forced in to buying unbalanced systems (how often do you see top end i7 paired with mid range gpu) and components you don't particularly want (brand of ssd/memory etc).

I think we will see an uptake in custom SFF machines which are currently being called "steam boxes", but best to ignore the title. Her, there is an advantage with a prebuilt in that it can be designed top down and doesn't have to conform to particular form factors.
The new Asus mini boxes, if priced right when they are released, could be great and I strongly expect the likes of Gigabyte and MSI to follow suit.

Business success follows sale volume and margins. You'll get much better margins putting components in a case that 'get the job done' rather than super quality parts. Besides it's easier to sell cheaper components to non-tech savy buyers and especially when all those parts are hidden in a big dark case. If you care about getting quality and price on a desktop you should build it yourself or be prepared to fork out a hefty premium for 'quality/ elite/ enthusiast advertised models'.

In the early days of PCs, you could save a LOT by buying bits and building. Of course, that brought smalmer OEM builders and integrators into the market, and system prices dropped. Big manufacturers sought volume by competing on price.

For instance, one of my early PCs, in the days when '286 was state of the art, was just shy of £10,000. Bearing in mind that's about 30 years ago, £10k then bought a fair bit more than £10k does now, and it ain't chump change now. And, it was VERY highly spec'd. For instance, the 338MB hard drive (yes, Megabyte) was about £1500 on it's own, and a 150MB tape drive was clise on £1000.

Anyway, for reasons others have already given, pre-built systems, other than from high-end or custom-builders, tend to be cost-trimmed wherever it's humanly possible, and especially where it doesn't show. So, that 1TB hard drive (for instance) the advertising boasts of is very likely to be the cheapest available, not the best, not fastest. The case may well have minimal expansion opportunities, the PSU just enough power but limited scope fof extras, and the motherboard may well have a minimalist BIOS with very little versatility.

so, if I'm building, an extra couple of quid here, and extra fiver there, makes little overall difference to my build cost, and if it gets me what I want but costs £550 rather than a bare bones £500, I don't really give a hoot. I regard the extra £50 as damn goid value.

But, for a manufacturer, if they want to compete with everybody else, increasing their costs by £50 makes no sense because the kind of buyers buying an off-the-shelf unit in PC World probably wouldn't understand what they were getting for their £50. To me, that £50 costs me £50. Oh well, who cares? But for the manufacturer selling 10,000 units a year, it's a £500,000 difference in profits, per year.

So, it's about buyer expectations.

Personally, I buy and build. My brother, however, tends to buy pre-built systems from John Lewis. Why? Because he's not as picky about maximising bang-per-buck, but DOES want simplucity if anything goes wrong. So for me, if something goes wrong, I gave to troubleshoot it. For him, it's a single item from a single supplier, so he gives it back and telks them to fix it.

There is, in other words, a degree of risking hassle, time and effort in fixing it if you built it.

And that, for me, is the real issue. If I build it, it's effort building, and perhaps troubleshooting build issues. And risk in fixing later issues. I am normally highly averse to making work for myself, and I understand my brother's logic in hassle-avoidance. Nonetheless, for me, the hassle is worth it to get EXACTLY the spec, and component quality, I want.

But if you aren't fussy about exact component selection, then buying a half-decent system, from a company with good customer service makes for an easy life. Usually. And the older you get, the more that typically appeals.


PS. Over the years, I've often hard very specific system requirement for specific purposes, be it a photo/video/audio production and editing system, a graphics workstation, a machine that's on 24/7 driving a radio transmitter but needing minimal power, or whatever. If you have very specific hardware needs, that alone might demand custom build, or home build.

Oh, one more point. Many individual component markets are now pretty much like commodity markets. Product differentiation is minimal, and as a result, ir's HIGHLY competitive, and margins are driven down as a result.

Some years ago, I had lunch with Finis Conner. If you don't know who he is, he and Al Shugart were the driving force and primary co-founders of Seagate. One point he made about competitive presdure in the hard drive market was that if you miss one capacity point, you have a very bad year. I.e. if you come up with a 720MB model, and everybody else does 740MB, you barely sell any.

Do that twice, and you're out of business.

Those kinds of component price pressures make it hard for mass sellers to compete on any much other than price, and are why they save pennies here, pennies there, on the "invisible" aspects of system spec.

For me personally, although I started out with a pre-built Dell, I would only ever build my own. That's not for any cost or performance reason, although they are informing factors when actually putting a spec together, but is simply because I bloody well like doing my own thing. So it's my nature that drives me to do that - as it is, I think, with most PC builders.

I don't think, though, that it's easy to generalise about the population as a whole. Plenty of really old people never have and never will have an sort of IT in their homes, but plenty of other post-75 year olds are quite the opposite. However, very few of them will do anything other than by off the shelf.

Lots of young people have lots of technology but I think very few will have the time, inclination or funds to indulge themselves in building their own stuff. Lots of working people are probably in the same boat - they might think they know a bit and might even fiddle under the bonnet a bit but they'll never build their own, even though its really lego for adults.

Those of us who do use these forums or those of overclockers or bit-tech etc. are, I feel, a hobbyist minority linked closely to the professional IT crowd.

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Originally Posted by RobbieRoy

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Those of us who do use these forums or those of overclockers or bit-tech etc. are, I feel, a hobbyist minority linked closely to the professional IT crowd.

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Agreed .... except of course to point out that a lot of people here, at the very least a significant minority, are themselves IT professionals.

It's rather strange, but all of my friends that I talk to regularly would only choose pre builts, but they studied computer tech and the like throughout college and uni, so that is no suprise. However, I was talking to my father not long ago about the death of my old pre built, and he is the exact opposite, even though he has been a computer tech for about twenty years. He heavily supports pre builts and advises against building your own.

I guess the divide is strong even with techies.

I had one prebuilt pc, and i regretted it, it slows down to a crawl after 2 years, and spend quite a bit to get it to work again, my other pc is 5 years old and now I'm planning to build a new one this week or week after

I think you have to look at added value, which in the high end/gaming world doesn't appear to be that much as it's all off the shelf components simply assembled.
Sometimes the difference in price between pre and self builds can be negligible but you're quite likely to end up with components you didn't really want.

If the likes of scan, chillblast, overclockers etc made well balanced systems to sit on shelves I think I might be more interested but they always have bizarre choices

For myself I would always custom build, however if you just want a cheap and cheerful system to browse the web, etc. it is hard to beat the value and convenience of a pre built system.

I tend to do incremental upgrades when my system starts to feel slow, or I cant run a game I want. Estimate would be £150 a year, with a bigger £300 spend every two+ years. An example was a new graphics card for £150 last year, then a mobo + RAM earlier this year, CPU a couple of months ago. Main things outside of this are monitors and storage. Haven't done a full on everything upgrade for over 10 years, bit like Trigger's broom.

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Originally Posted by Flibb

bit like Trigger's broom.

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lol. So you're still using the same screw then?

If building a PC is fun for you, it makes sense to build it yourself. If it is a hassle, it makes sense to get pre-built.

I agree with earlier poster about longevity though. The systems I've built myself have lasted much longer and been more able to benefit from mid life kickers than the pre-built systems I bought in the early days.

I think there is something satisfying about spec'ing and buying each part to build yourself. It is a bit of a learning process to discover what the current trends but i find it more satisfying to have the exact system that you want. Often mainstream prebuilt machines tend to economise on things like the case or PSU - plus as others have said the value for money aspect of building your own can be greater

There doesn't seem to be as much of a price difference in pre-built vs custom as there was 10 years ago, maybe its more competitive.
That said you can't beat the satisfaction and having the exact spec you want like legitfromtheman said.

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Originally Posted by chrisFletcher

That said you can't beat the satisfaction and having the exact spec you want like legitfromtheman said.

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That's what I found. I don't think I'd buy a pre-built again, I've enjoyed using my computer a lot more knowing I built it.

Self built gets you exactly what you want for the best price and this way you KNOW Your system a bit better as well.

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Originally Posted by Saracen

But if you aren't fussy about exact component selection, then buying a half-decent system, from a company with good customer service makes for an easy life.

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Finding the bit in bold seems to be where the problem lies.

So many people I know/knew insisted on pre-built for that whole 'peace of mind' warranty/support thing, until they discovered most places know less about fixing computers than a car fitter knows about the differential transmission on a motorcycle*... and it was always something somehow not covered by the small-print of the contract, so ended up being insanely expensive!

Basically, if *I* could fix what they couldn't, they weren't worth it!









*That is to say, it doesn't even have one!

If something goes wrong, you should (hopefully!) know what's wrong and how to fix it. If it's prebuilt, you may still know what you're doing, but it's likely to be more of a challenge replacing hardware. Prebuilt machines tend to be small and tightly packed with the hardware they need... and nothing more. As such, upgrades of any kind can be a real pain. Just try adding more storage when the case only has room for one HDD and the OEM motherboard has only a single SATA 3 port.

Maybe I'm a bit of a recluse but even if I had a prebuilt machine with a warranty, I'd probably still prefer to stay indoors and fix it myself. The average Dixons-esque outfits know far too little about fixing computers and try and get away with charging obscene amounts of money for simple repairs. There are some exceptions, of course. I hear good things about Novatech, for example. Though it's hardly surprising that they would know how to fix computers they've built themselves.

I always laugh at people who say they 'built their computer'. If anything they did less than your average ikea flat pack.

Owww look at my bedside table, I built that myself... lol

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Originally Posted by abaxas

I always laugh at people who say they 'built their computer'. If anything they did less than your average ikea flat pack.

Owww look at my bedside table, I built that myself... lol

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I think there's a quite a difference between assembly and spec'ing up and designing your own build.

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Originally Posted by kalniel

I think there's a quite a difference between assembly and spec'ing up and designing your own build.

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Always fancied designing my own processor. With an FPGA you can do it these days fairly cheaply, but you would still have to port tool chains like GCC to your instruction set to get it to do anything which is an off-putting amount of time overall.

But then someone would be fabricating the fpga, I still wouldn't be building my own computer. Perhaps if you could make your own transistors and aim for something like a PDP8...

My first computer was a prebuilt. It was pretty bad, mainly because I wasn't knowledgeable.

I always feel like they skimp out on GPUs, sometimes completely foregoing them and leaving it to integrated graphics.

I will always go custom build and always have since that computer. There are decent prebuilts out there for respectable prices, but often enough a "gaming computer" has too many lights, a subpar GPU, and wastes cash on an i7 when an equivalent i5 is sufficient.

I always would recommend building if you want a desktop it generally cheaper and you can cut costs where you decide the extra money is need make the PC better for your particular needs.

I think I'd prefer my next desktop to be pre-built. I think the cost saving has almost disappeared and there are plenty of system builders that will use quality PSUs and cases unlike 5 or 10 years ago. It would take away a lot of hassle and you'd still be able to incrementally upgrade it. Or am I just being lazy?

One thing that would stop me from buying pre-built is the lack of reviews. Years ago PC magazine would review not just components but entire systems. Now.. well, I don't know, haven't bought a single magazine for ages, but it is rare for entire system (desktop) to be reviewed online.

There are certain things I am not very good at when it comes to system building, one being cable management. So it is not unthinkable that a company that builds system for enthusiasts by enthusiasts could get my attention, but I'd need other enthusiasts to vouch for them. Unlikely since most enthusiasts build their own PCs.

Besides, it would also need to meet my requirement of quiet computing which is not a priority for everyone. So I won't say never ever, but I think it is unlikely that I will buy pre-built desktops for myself.

The faff of calling technical support in order to coax out a technician visit on a fault I've already diagnosed is enough to put me off prebuilt machines.