superchunk said:
Well, the last two I linked to had 'decent' cards for basic gaming. Not top of the line, but fine for most games. I agree that there are issues with buying a prebuilt system, biggest is the crap they preinstall and give you on thier restore disks, but there are some nice advantages. 1. in house warranty. If you build it, the warranty and time to find and fix an issue can be a real pain in the ass. Plus, if you went generic on that particular part, you could easily not even have much of a warranty at all. 2. setup is cake. 5-10mins compared to 45m-1hr. 3. overall cheaper these days, with usually more features. Like multi card readers and such. I personally, am undecided if my next pc will be pre-built or me-built. The one I am currently on is 4years old and was me-built. At that time I saved a few hundred dollars for a much better system. Now, everytime I peice one together it seems I can find a similar if not better featured model on Dell or Frys electronics. I will probably go me-built again, only because I get to actually pick what brandnames of parts I get, and I enjoy putting it together. It will definitely be built around AMD 64 multi cores, Vista, and focused as a Media PC. |
I've owned OEM PCs and built my own PCs before. I also did PC repair for Geek Squad for 2 years. To be honest, I would much rather deal with my own hardware problems than rely on an OEM to deal with them for me.
1) If you deal with the OEM, it can take them weeks to resolve an issue that you yourself could resolve quickly and easily. You also don't have to spend hours on the phone with Bob from Bangladesh. No offense to these people; it's the builder's fault for hiring service reps who can't speak English worth a damn.
2) "Setup" on an OEM PC for me includes removing all the crap that they preload. Often, the easiest way to do this is to reinstall the operating system from scratch (if you get an OS disk instead of a generic "restore to factory" disk), which takes just as long as if you built the thing yourself. If you know what you're doing, you can remove most of their stuff manually, but this takes time as well.
3) You do usually get a good deal on OEM PCs, especially because they get paid to preload all that crap on your system. Unfortunately, you also get substandard components, which is another way they make money. For example, OEM hard drives typically carry a one-year warranty and aren't built to the same spec as consumer-level hard drives with 3- or 5-year warranties. You can get a 3-year warranty on a pre-built system, but it usually costs you an extra couple hundred bucks. Furthermore, you're more likely to have to use that warranty, because they use the same cheap components whether you buy the extended warranty or not (and they're more likely to fail after the 3 years expires, too).
Basically, you get what you pay for. Most consumer-level products carry equal or better warranties than what you'll get from a system builder like Dell or HP/Compaq. Seagate hard drives have 5-year warranties. EVGA graphics cards have lifetime warranties, and so do several brands of RAM. The fact is, that 'similar' system that you see on Dell.com really isn't as 'similar' on the inside as the spec sheet indicates.
And come on. Those pre-built PCs have some nasty ugly cases. :) (They have gotten better about this in the last few years.)
