Getting a gaming rig. Buy or Build?

[Garcian Smith]

Phrancheyez said:

Actually, you're wrong.  My first line and last line make perfect sense.  Everyone says 'it's so much cheaper!' when in reality, its only a little cheaper.  'Little' and 'so much' are opposites, in case you didn't know.

Last, you didn't pay attention to the link I provided.  I can build a PC just as good as what you want for around the same price.  And they're going to stress test it for 3 days straight after overclocking everything they can.  I might spend $50-100 more..big whoop.  I don't have to do all the tedious work, and if I'm getting a gaming beast, I don't care about ~$100 when I don't have to worry about doing all the work involved as far as ordering parts, connecting it all, overclocking, stabilizing, tweaking and software removal.  Have fun, all that work is worth a hundred bucks to me.

And, who the hell buys HP for gaming?  Or Dell for that matter, they're always overpriced.  Someone who doesn't know shit about computers, that's who.  You people are going to spend just as much money as I would through digital storm, and get the same pc, except mine will come with everything overclocked, set up, and extra shit software stripped, and I don't have to do any of it.

Yeah you're so wrong. Building yourself is a lot cheaper, especially when you factor in the fact that most prebuilts will advertise a few good components (usually CPU and video card) and then fill in the other components with lowest-bidder junk.

And who cares if they overclock it for you? Overclocking is easy. For the GPU, just fire up Rivatuner and FurMark and bump up the clockspeed of your GPU and VRAM until you start to see artifacts or your card heats up too much. After you do, just drop it down to the last setting. For the CPU, grab an aftermarket cooler like the Arctic Cooling Freezer Pro, run a utility like ATI Overdrive, and bump the bus speed up in 2-4 MHz increments, running something like SuperPi with each bump to make sure it's stable. Then, after you reach your limit, reset it back to its last stable setting, bump up your Vcore a notch, and repeat until you're not getting much benefit from each bump or the temperature reaches unstable levels. (All of these utilities, by the way, are free to download.) Then boot up a graphically intensive game like Crysis for a couple of hours to make sure your system is stable. It really is that easy, and the worst thing that'll happen if you don't do something stupid is you'll have to manually reset your BIOS, which is simple and requires about 10 minutes at most. There's nothing complex about OCing that requires you to pay someone else to do it for you - unless they're doing some crazy hardware mods to your GPU or something, in which case you might as well just purchase the next step up in hardware yourself.

Seriously - name any PC built by this stupid prebuilt company and I'll throw together something on Newegg that'll be both significantly cheaper and more reliable.