I’ve build hundreds of PC’s and probably repaired even more computers over the last 10 years. For the most part – it’s always been cheaper to build a PC for someone that acually buy one outright. I often wonder – is that still the case? I’ve upgraded a thing or two here or there, but I haven’t done an entire “case build” computer in a couple years now. When I read the ExtremeTech article “Building Mom a $400 PC” – it pretty much answered my questions. Joel’s goal was to build a new computer for his mother (case and internals only), that would basically be a simple workstation for surfing the web, email, and printing out some greeting cards. Sounds like what most of the friends and family I built and repaired computers for do as well. And it really made me wonder, since you can get a complete computer with LCD monitor, laser mouse, keyword, and case for under $500-$600 brand new from Dell is it still worth building one?More…
The second page of the article lists the parts Joel bought, and he got out for just $379. Not bad considering he bought an $89 case and power supply. He got an Asus MB, a nice AMD Athlon 64 CPU, 2GB of DDR2, 256MB Sapphire graphics card, 80GB hard drive, and 18x DVD+/-RW for that same price as well. So far – I’m pretty impressed! As I read on in the article he describes how he put the old system hard drive in an empty external usb enclosure to get the data from when the new system was up and running, and the new build went pretty smoothly. The new PC went together, and everything seemed fine, for a few days. Then there was all kinds of crashing and issues, which he figured out through testing were both the graphics card and the ‘cheap’ memory he bought. One he returned the memory and graphics card – and went with a slightly better brand (of memory) and the motherboard onboard GPU, everything was rock solid stable and fine. His end cost was $348.
So I guess the answer is YES, you can still buy a very reasonable and stable custom computer and build it yourself. You MAY have to search for the best deals on some parts, BUT stick with better brands – cheaper is NOT always better. If you’re looking for parts to upgrade, or want to build a new one from the ground up – here are the some of the most reputable places I know of with good prices, quality service, and a decent return policy. Please, comment now to add your two cents in the mix!!
