Building a PC

[schmenke]

I'm curious Daniel, how much does it cost to procure all the bits individually and build a PC versus purchasing a complete one? How much do you actually save?

[Mark]

Used to be you'd save tonnes. But these days not so much. What you do get is a choice of each component you have and can be sure of the quality of each of them as you've specced it yourself.

[Daniel]

I'm curious Daniel, how much does it cost to procure all the bits individually and build a PC versus purchasing a complete one? How much do you actually save?

Well I personally don't save anything to be perfectly honest if we're comparing cost on its own I end up paying more! But for my money I get better components which have a better warranty, better performance, are far quieter and are also more reliable.


Here for instance is the stock CPU cooler next to the aftermarket one I purchased.


Guess which one will dissipate heat better and be quieter? You never notice just how noisy computers are till you experience just how quiet a quiet one is.

If you were building purely with cost I think you could build one for the same price as a Dell give or take a few dollars/pounds

Like Mark says, you get a choice of components and you know the quality of them whereas Dell or HP can sometimes put in the components which they feel will give the best balance between cost and lasting the warranty period.

You

[Rollo]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAG39jKi0lI

My Blackberry's not working...

[Roamy]

pretty nice Daniel but please leave your favorite out of the instructions

C colon enter

[Mark]

Putting a PC together is easy, the difficult bit is when your maintaining a PC you haven't seen before, now, exactly which screws are holding that drive bay in?!

[MrJan]

Well I personally don't save anything to be perfectly honest if we're comparing cost on its own I end up paying more! But for my money I get better components which have a better warranty, better performance, are far quieter and are also more reliable.

What about if you were to make a like for like system?

The hardware stuff sort of makes sense to me, I've even gone to the drastic steps of upgrading the RAM in my PC in the last few days. Where I fall down is when you stop just plugging bits together and start to try and use the thing. For example you then have to install an OS and software, that **** would grind me down.

[Mark]

What about if you were to make a like for like system?

You'd still probably lose out as the likes of Dell buys components in bulk.

[Daniel]

For a like for like system it depends. For a very low end machine a Dell will be cheaper most if not all of the time. For a mid range machine it'll probably be neck and neck and for a like for like gaming machine a home built machine will usually be cheaper as Dell doesn't sell as many of those sorts of machines so their discounts aren't so low plus they charge through the nose for them.

Installing the os is dead simple and you can just leave the pc to do it's thing and just come back every 5 minutes to see what it's up to.

[Mark]

Yep, installing an OS these days is crazy simple. Only takes about an hour for a Windows 7 install and then you're ready to go, and most of that is just it installing stuff.