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I recently started getting into pcpartpicker and "building" pcs.

With the help of my friend i am learning about PC parts (which are the best/worst/ones to get etc).

I hope to sometime build a sweet gaming pc (for the fun of building, not because I _need_ one.

I don't know why i posted this on this website.

It really doesn't belong

Pre-built PCs are almost always a bad deal, building your own is the way to go. Be prepared for everyone and their mum to ask you to build them a new computer though!

StudlyCaps wrote:Pre-built PCs are almost always a bad deal, building your own is the way to go. Be prepared for everyone and their mum to ask you to build them a new computer though!

That's when you bring out the consulting fee...

To be quite honest, between sometime around 2002 and 2015 I purchased, or "inherited", a number of stock / budget PCs and laptops which served their everyday purposes quite well. In the early years of the Aldi PC (think "Walmart") you had to be wary, as the systems were often put together with little regard to interoperability of the components. But things have straightened out quite a bit since then, and today basically any stock PC is quite good enough for everyday use.

Point in case, my kids are quite satisfied playing Minecraft on machines that were office throwouts from several years ago (first generation Core 2 Duo's with moderately upgraded gfx boards), and my second-generation netbook is still doing duty as "remote console" when I want to combine living-room comfiness with working on some text.

Things get different, of course, if you're looking for the latest in performance, let's say because you want to play a new 3D game that was released recently and isn't supported by your old hardware. (That was when I finally got myself a "real" system again in 2015 -- Elite Dangerous was to blame.)

But even then, the "nimbus" of system building from "back then" is long gone, because 1) desktops have long since become commodities, and 2) you will probably get better assistance from a vendor website than you could get from an "expert" twenty years ago. (I remember the trickiness of getting Mainboard southbridge, RAM timing, and gfx card to cooperate properly... all of it little to no problem today.)

I clicked together my gaming rig in 10 minutes, and wasn't disappointed in the least. Still serves me well.

Heck, I remember when I selected my adapter card and harddisk carefully and after a week of deliberation. Today my home directory doesn't even reside on the hard drive, but is network-mounted from a budget fileserver in the basement...

But yes. Of course every friend and relative expects you to fix up their machines as well.

Kazinsal wrote:That's when you bring out the consulting fee...

It's a good way to get 50 bucks and a case of beer for 2 hours work!

Solar wrote:today basically any stock PC is quite good enough for everyday use.

I totally agree, the problem isn't that they're bad PCs the problem is they're still bad deals! Those stock PCs and laptops are fine for everyday use, but new they would have cost >$2k for less than $600 of parts and an hour of labor. I think that hasn't really changed, the advantage of building your own is you can install the parts you need for the things you want, you don't pay for things you aren't going to use. Plus you don't get gouged over "market segmentation", want a dedicated GPU? Better shell out for the elite-super-gaming version of your laptop, with 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD!

Geeez, what kind of prices are you buying at?

I wouldn't pay more than, say, 350 € for an "office" type desktop or laptop, stock or self-built...

Gaming rigs are something different, of course. I shelled out 2300 € for mine, but that was with an i7, GTX 770 (which was pretty new back then), 16 gigs of RAM, BluRay writer and a big SSD drive...

Ha, well one point - I'm thinking prices in Australian $ which is ~60c Euro.
You can indeed buy cheaper computers though, but they are still quite expensive for what you get. I was thinking i5-ish specs.

My own PC I built myself about 3 months ago, about $1800, similar spec'd off the shelf looks about $3000. I'd say that's enough of a difference to justify the effort.

StudlyCaps wrote:My own PC I built myself about 3 months ago, about $1800, similar spec'd off the shelf looks about $3000. I'd say that's enough of a difference to justify the effort.

Hmmn, I suspect that the PC market in Australia is significantly different from that in Germany; it certainly is from that in the US. $1375USD for still seems pricey for a component build to me, unless it included all new equipment including a large-ish monitor.

Last year and early this year (starting around June 2016 and dragging on until almost this past June), I was spec'ing a few different separate PCs, two high-end systems for a friend and a low-end one for myself which he was going to cover in exchange for doing the research (long story). I looked at several configurations for component builds as well as custom builds from a number of customizers such as Falcon NW.

The high end systems were a video editing system for indy filmmaking, and a VR rig for working on designing and testing Oculus Rift programs. It started out with the idea of a sort of mega-build, a very-small-footprint and physically light desktop system that could do both jobs and which he could move between two different offices in different cities over 300 miles apart. After spending a lot of time frustratingly working on this (as much as I am able to work on anything, so... an hour or two a week?), I convinced him that the combination of specs was not going to fit, and that he needed to have two different systems, one in each office (though he still wanted it to be physically small for some good reasons that aren't really relevant here) each rigged for a specific purpose but capable of handling the others' work load in a pinch.

These were some hefty systems, with one build calling for four 8TiB HDDs, two 1TB SSDs, and a pair of top-line nVidia-GPU video cards (at least 1080Ti, preferably Titan X). It topped out at around $4500 US, not counting the high-end supersized 4K monitors he wanted (which I was also researching. for him - I was being a bit of a tool).

The other was way on the other end of the spectrum, with a $500 US hard price limit. Despite this, I managed to spec a previous-gen 8-core AMD system with 16GB DDR2 RAM, a 1TB HDD, a nice but not great AMD-based video card, and a 23" monitor.

Despite this, I am pretty sure that if I were willing to put up with a cheap Dell (stripping out the bundled shovelware and installing Linux as the base system with Windows 10 in virtualization), I could have gotten it for $400 US.

We do pay more down here, for sure. I've heard it refered to as the nice beaches tax

The PC I build was an i7, 512 SSD, and a GTX980 - which I picked up before the 1080 came out, much to my annoyance when I realized the newer card was going to be cheaper. I didn't include the price of a bunch of old mechanical drives, which were hand-me-downs from an old system I had. I didn't include the monitor either, because it's a silly luxury thing for playing twitch-fps games.

You can absolutely get a Dell for under $500, but the specs are very low. Things like Pentium G series and low speed mechanical drives. I would expect they'd crumble even watching HD video with a second application open in the background, which would drive me nuts.

I think in the end, it makes more sense to build the more expensive the system is. Pre-built margins get higher the higher the base price, but it really takes about the same amount of time to build a $300 box to run Facebook and a $3k box to run Battlefield.

On the other side of the Earth, I've upgraded two my PCs a few months ago from Pentium 4 and Core 2 Duo E4500, to Core 2 Duo E8400 and Core 2 Quad Q6600 which I've bought on the local flee market for like 19$ for both.

zaval wrote:On the other side of the Earth, I've upgraded two my PCs a few months ago from Pentium 4 and Core 2 Duo E4500, to Core 2 Duo E8400 and Core 2 Quad Q6600 which I've bought on the local flee market for like 19$ for both.

See now this is good value for money!