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Computer Building vs Buying

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Mulligan9111 said:
If you can swing it, I'd definitely opt for an SSD for the OS. The boot up times and general operations are a lot faster with the SSD. Another option if you want to stay with 1 single hard drive is to look into a Hybrid SSD drive. These aren't quite as fast as SSD's, but they are in between a normal hard drive and SSD's.
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I'm not terribly picky, honestly. If I can separate the two and it will improve the performance, I'm all for it.
 
I've built two in the past couple years. I would say buy one if it came with a windows and drivers disc. It's such a headache getting everything to work together and the markup doesn't seem that high.
 
I have never been into a high-end gaming rig, but had always pieced together my own mid/low range machines.

At this point though, I am still on XP on the machine I use as my main desktop (have a netbook for travel), on the next machine I will just end up buying something off the shelf. Main reason? Operating system. I run enough cobbled together/patched together stuff, it would be nice to grab something new.

Never been a huge PC gamer (WOW, Torchlight, NHL, stuff like that). Things change so quickly now, I figure if I want to be on the cutting edge of gaming I would be better off just grabbing one of the consoles.
 
Building in my opinion is always the way to go, regardless of budget.

If you're not in a rush, you can buy all the separate components at different times for really good prices.

The act of assembling the computer itself is slightly tricky the first time around, but very doable.
 
my last game rig i got was a local build. cost me 2k and the local guy did the assembly for me for 150. i didnt understand raid array and dual boot systems so i had him do it to get me a raid array and dual boot xp and win 7. used name brand products and 3 years later its still going strong. id take that any day over an alienware or falconnw who at the time priced out at over 3k for the same componants
 
It really depends on how much you are going to use the system for photoshop ect. You dont really need a super high end graphics card for the basics unless you are gaming hardcore.

I built a photoshop machine / media server for $600 last year. Its a new AMD Quad Core with 16gb of RAM.

Newegg is a great place to price your build, but id say go with a nice 128gb SSD for your OS ect and have a larger SATA HDD for storage of files.
 
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ir13 said:
It really depends on how much you are going to use the system for photoshop ect. You dont really need a super high end graphics card for the basics unless you are gaming hardcore.

I built a photoshop machine / media server for $600 last year. Its a new AMD Quad Core with 16gb of RAM.

Newegg is a great place to price your build, but id say go with a nice 128gb SSD for your OS ect and have a larger SATA HDD for storage of files.
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My guess is the focus would be on games like Battlefield, Minecraft, maybe some form of golf game. I'm not sure how those would be categorized.

I'd also want to be able to run something similar to iMovie and photoshop.
 
I have always gone the route of building it myself as you have the complete flexibility of what parts you put in there, which you don't tend to get to the same degree with pre-builts

My current PC (which is now getting a bit old, like me) still does everything I want it to, but I have the option to throw a new graphics card in it if I wanted or another 5 hard drives - the only thing I couldn't do is upgrade the processor as the socket type has changed, so to change that would mean a new motherboard and memory as well

If you decide to build your own I would maybe ask on PC specific forums for build options, but make sure you state your own specific requirements for use as there will be loads of people who can provide you with options but you will get a mixture of suggestions and options if you wanted to tweak things or future upgrade paths etc - I am going to refrain from giving those suggestions as I am not up to speed these days with the latest gear and pricing will be so different to here in the UK, but a mate of mine does it for a living so if you want his details just drop me a PM and I can point you in his direction

Building your own these days isn't that difficult as long as you take your time (if you haven't done it before) and a lot of things are colour coded so unless you are a right idiot you can't really plug anything into the wrong place

You also have the satisfaction of knowing you built it, but you do lose the technical support that you would get from buying pre-built if something goes wrong
 
I like warranties so aftera lot of research I purchased one built from origin. It was expensive but it's the most well built machine I have seen. You can get a cheap pc that will work well from Ibuypower or ccyberpower that will work well but will have cheap components and look like it was put together by a ten yearold with wires everywhere.
 
JRod said:
I like warranties so aftera lot of research I purchased one built from origin. It was expensive but it's the most well built machine I have seen. You can get a cheap pc that will work well from Ibuypower or ccyberpower that will work well but will have cheap components and look like it was put together by a ten yearold with wires everywhere.
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Keep in mind most if not all of the components you use to build your own will carry a manufacturer warranty as long as you don't do crazy over clocking etc . If something breaks you just need to be able to troubleshoot what it is.
 
A good gaming rig for $700 could be kind of tight. I think you'll find once you really start looking into it that you can do much better for $1000 - $1200. A few pieces of advice from someone who has built a number of machines over the years:

1. The Corsair cases are absolute dreams to build in. They may cost a bit more, but in my view, they're totally worth it. I think my current machine is built in the Carbide model and it's just awesome but it is noisy. I think they have a quiet model too which I would use next time. A nice case will make your build so much easier. I would say another friendly case manufacturer to build in is Antec. Some of their enthusiast stuff is pretty good too.

2. Most or all of the computer part retailers will price match/beat competitor prices on components and they all tend to have deals on different parts at different times. People tend to miss this and don't take advantage of it. What I always do is make a spreadsheet of the parts I want, 5 or so of the big online retailers and their price for the part. You'll find that many of the parts you want will be on sale at one retailer or another. Submit all of your price matches to the one retailer most convenient to you and blammo! You've just saved enough money for the better graphics card you wanted or a 2TB Storage drive.

3. Definitely get an SSD for the OS. I moved to one of these last year and cut my boot time to probably about 20% of what it formally was. These things are just awesome. After reading a number of reviews, I went with a Samsung EVO and it has been great.

If you have any questions about this stuff or parts suggestions, let me know!
 
Here is a computer if you're spending more than the original $500. Assuming you already have a monitor.

http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/deskto...7328803&CA_6C15C=600003960000012744#customize

Use coupon code USPK54E0373 to get it for $819 shipped.

I would say this about about onboard graphics. My $800 graphics card runs so hot it could cook eggs and consumes 500 watts of power and mostly what I do is browse web pages. My other htpc build uses onboard and renders 1080p movies flawlessly with just an old I5 processor so this should cover %95 of computer users.
 
lightningbolt44 said:
Keep in mind most if not all of the components you use to build your own will carry a manufacturer warranty as long as you don't do crazy over clocking etc . If something breaks you just need to be able to troubleshoot what it is.
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Yep which I know nothing about.

So far the Origin has been a dream. Granted it's no where near the 700$ budget but to build your own you need to be able to

A: Efficiently match all the hardware

B: Troubleshoot problems
 
I've built them before, but won't ever do it again. Never really had any issues building them,but the cost is so low now for manfactured vs build your own, that the plus side of having one company to go to if something is messed up vs having to deal with several is a big deal. Plus you don't have to worry about compatability issues.
 
Really the only compatibility issues (nowadays) are between the processor and the motherboard. That is resolved by looking at the list of motherboards your processor manufacturer recommends.
I would recommend a large case if you have the room for it. So much easier to install components/run wires. I love my Cooler Master, plenty of bay space, built in cable routing, and room between components for better airflow.
Remember, graphics require clean power so don't skimp on the size/quality of your power supply.

Sent from my DROID BIONIC using Tapatalk
 
I used to always suggest building (or build for people) over buying. Anymore, if you're under 1K budget, it's typically more cost effective to just buy one. That said, I *always* build my own as I'm very particular on the components used.
 
Spent 2k on my last build and it crashes 20 seconds after startup 8 months out of the year. It's fine after rebooting, but just really annoying and unfixable.
 
http://pcpartpicker.com

Dan, I got everything through this website to build my sons gaming computer. It was easy and fun and I saved a bundle. Spent $800 for a system that would be over $1500 off the shelf. Jump in and do it, you won't regret it.
 
I'll never buy one again after building my last 3 - did the first on a whim and spent about $1150 for something comparable to a Dell that was $1600. As others have said though, the lower end is hard to justify. I normally started to see the benefit around $900+ for what I was doing. I did start to get picky about brands for certain components, otherwise I probably could have saved more.

The other thing that is a benefit, imo, is if you spend a little more now on higher end components that you can "recycle", your NEXT machine in 4 years will be that much cheaper.
 
Unless you're someone actually skilled in computer engineering, building a computer is a waste of time/effort in my opinion. I'm not saying it's hard because it's actually fairly easy, but if you don't know what you're actually doing and what each component is designed to do, you won't know what to do if something goes wrong. A lot of $500-$700 pc's these days are actually really decent for gaming and photoshop work. Also, Mac's are always inferior to PC's as far as gaming is concerned. The graphics cards on all current macs are pretty mediocre compared to what PC manufactuers put in their machines.
 
Either way you go look at the number of ram slots and max memory the motherboard can handle. Cheapest way to increase performance on a PC is more memory.

And look at lightworks and gimp for the imovie and photoshop alternatives.
 
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