News Why Building Your Own PC Is Still a Smart Move in 2023

[USAFRet]

My personal build/buy level is about $600.
Under that, buy.

Also, use case.
My current HTPC is a Beelink GTR Pro. Rock solid little system.
It does exactly what it needs to do, no need for any future changes or upgrades.
It will never be morphed into a game system.

All the other systems in the house...built.

 

[rabbit4me2]

I feel the author completely missed the mark in this article. By the time you take to price your parts and get them and put them in a PC you can buy something pre-built but the main thing is the warranty. For 150 bucks you can get a rock solid warranty and not have to worry about anything versus having to go to numerous manufacturers if a park messes up therefore putting together a PC in this time is completely utterly pointless. Peace of mind versus Frankenstein I like sleeping at night.

 

[USAFRet]

I feel the author completely missed the mark in this article. By the time you take to price your parts and get them and put them in a PC you can buy something pre-built but the main thing is the warranty. For 150 bucks you can get a rock solid warranty and not have to worry about anything versus having to go to numerous manufacturers if a park messes up therefore putting together a PC in this time is completely utterly pointless. Peace of mind versus Frankenstein I like sleeping at night.

Building your own system is not for everyone.
If that full system warranty is the tipping for you, go for it.

But often, that full system warranty falls far short of the individual parts warranties.

A part, that on its own, would have a 5 year warranty is completely negated by the 1 year full system warranty that is all so common.

...therefore putting together a PC in this time is completely utterly pointless...

To each his or her own.

 

[artk2219]

I build for my company... I love the "I built that. It's gorgeous to look at. It's a screamer. And it didn't cost an arm and a leg." feeling. The complexity is getting pretty ridiculous though. Last build I forgot to match up the front panel connectors to the motherboard and ended up with a dead front panel USB-C because there wasn't a connector on the stupid mobo. Doh. I also love shopping for bang-for-the-buck. It's just a great feeling to slap it all together and see it boot. Pacing around the office as I type.... UPS delivery this afternoon!

If you're talking about that USB 3.2 Type E cable, they make adapters for that. It wont work at full speed, but at least the port would be available. One of the beauties of USB, USB is USB is USB.

Amazon.com

Amazon.com

 

[bit_user]

My half dozen builds in the last 20 years have all powered up successfully the first time...

I had a good track record, too... until I tried to build an Apollo Lake mini-ITX machine. That one nearly broke me. It turned out the DC-DC converter board I was sold seems defective (or maybe designed for 19 VDC input, the internet seems to know nothing about his board) and the memory which Crucial's Memory Finder assured me would work with my ASRock J4205-ITX motherboard only worked if I used just one DIMM and put it in the second slot. I didn't even get those two things sorted out until years later, when I took another swing at getting it working. That said, it's a rather nonstandard machine, so I don't see it as an indictment on DIY.

That reminds me of another time online memory compatibility tools let me down. When I built a Sandybridge-E workstation, I also used Crucial's compatibility checker. It told me to use their 1.35V DDR3 DIMMs. However, when I installed them, they ran at 1333 MHz instead of the rated 1600. It turns out that board supports both Sandybridge and Ivy Bridge CPUs and Ivy Bridge likes 1.35V, but Sandybridge doesn't. I found a doc on Intel's site specifying what speeds that CPU would run different voltage, rank, and occupancy DIMMs at, confirming I needed 1.5V for 1600 MHz operation. I complained to Crucial about this, and they said:

1. Our tool only checks the motherboard compatibility, and those DIMMs are indeed compatible with that board, running an Ivy Bridge CPU, at the rated speed.
2. Sorry, we no longer have any of the 1.5V ECC UDIMMs you need for 1600 MHz, so you're SoL.

Luckily, I had just bought Haswell Xeon E + motherboard for my dad, so I could give him the 1.35V DIMMs and just eat the cost of buying another brand of 1.5V DIMMs for myself. Of course, that meant he had to run 2DPC, because my board was quad-channel and his was only dual-channel, but he preferred the additional capacity to any performance hit from running a quad-DIMM config.

It's minor headaches like this which make me sympathetic with people who just don't want to deal with this stuff. That's why I would never tell someone they should DIY, unless I know them well and think they'd enjoy the process.

I thought something might be wrong with this one on the initial boot because the debug LEDs stayed on for 4-5 minutes... but it was the "Ryzen memory training." The lights went out and the PC did post.

OMG, now you're dredging up traumatic memories of BIOS beep codes.
: O

 

[USAFRet]

A few years ago, when my eldest grandson was 11 years old....watching him take a pile of new parts boxes and making a working PC in an afternoon....priceless.

Late November, I called him and asked "Are you busy on Saturday? I'm making a new PC and need your help."
I had bought all the parts, boxes sitting on the kitchen table.
The only part of the assembly I did was putting the CPU in.
After that, I said "Go for it."

2-3 hours later, the glow in his eyes as he pushed the power button and stuff appeared on the monitor...priceless.
He graduated high school last week, that PC still runs.


Opening a Dell box and pressing the button is not even close.

Today, the hardest part of building a PC is the parts selection.

 

[bit_user]

Depending on which distribution and flavor of Linux you choose, they're actually as bad, if not worse, than Microsoft. For instance, the most recent non-LTS version of Ubuntu (23.04) was released April 20 of this year. It's EOL is January, 20th of next year (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_version_history#Table_of_versions). Compare this to Windows 11 22H2, which was released September 20, 2022, and has support until Oct 4, 2024 (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows-11-home-and-pro)

That's kind of apples vs. oranges, though. Unless you have some hardware with a proprietary or non-upstreamed driver that's only supported on a certain distro release, you can usually just upgrade the distro without issue. As for in-tree drivers, Linux is generally way better about not dropping support for old hardware.

I've been running Ubuntu on 6 different PCs (2 of them laptops) for over 12 years, and generally haven't had issues with distro upgrades.

 

[Geezer760]

The saving money aspect starts to get a little less so the cheaper you get. For instance, once you get down to the <$800 range or you just need some computer to do basic stuff with, it starts becoming harder for me to feel that building my own computer becomes worth it unless I take advantage of some fire sale like Black Friday.

For instance, the cost of a Windows license is at the minimum around $100. When your OS is approaching >15% of the total BOM cost, that starts to become less appealing. Of course you could just use Windows without activating it, since it's basically like WinRAR at this point. And no, I won't count buying keys from resellers like Kinguin or whatnot because there's no real way to prove they're completely legitimate.

EDIT: I may have missed it, but some websites do offer to build a computer for you, you just send them the shopping list of parts you want.

On the edit part: yeah, that website you give your part list to is gonna have a LABOR cost on top that equals mor cash you could have used for a better GPU,CPU etc... just build it yourself, watch youtube videos if you don't know how.

 

[cAllen]

Last prebuilt desktop we had was a Dell consumer P4. Will never do that again.

 

[Geezer760]

On the edit part: yeah, that website you give your part list to is gonna have a LABOR, shipping & handling costs on top that equals more cash that you could have used for a better GPU,CPU etc... just build it yourself, watch youtube videos if you don't know how.

 

[bit_user]

Dell is... And while their baseline systems are almost somewhat barely reasonable, the moment you try to add any performance the price goes through the roof. For example $2500.00 for a 4TB nvme drive...

LOL, that specific example is why my team bought their PCs with the cheap storage and just added aftermarket drives on our own. Sadly, it's company policy to use Dell, so full DIY wasn't an option.

Apple "fixed" this loophole... The only thing standard about their SSDs is the form factor.

 

[bit_user]

Has anybody on earth, Influencers excluded, ever gotten good or even acceptable customer service from one of the big PC manufacturers? I'm pretty sure the only way to get Dell to even answer the phone is to have 100+ retweets on a complaint about the company.

Yes. I bought a enterprise hard drive from Dell, at work. They were excellent about cross-shipping me a replacement when the first one failed during the RAID rebuild. They didn't give me any runaround with having to prove the drive was defective, or anything.

Granted, it's not a PC, but it was post-sales support or whatever. That said, my company is a pretty big customer.

 

[bit_user]

Last prebuilt desktop we had was a Dell consumer P4. Will never do that again.

Back in 2005, I bought a NAS. I figured it would be designed to extract the best performance from the hard drives and didn't want to deal with the software configuration of setting up my own fileserver. What I got was a measly 30 MB/s from a RAID-5 of 4x 7200 RPM 300 GB drives. And I paid $500 (excluding drives) for the privilege of such underwhelming performance.

Then, in 2009, when time came to upgrade, I built my own Phenom II-based fileserver. It cost me maybe $100 more, but it delivered 330 MB/s reads and 270 MB/s writes on RAID-6 of 5x 7200 1 TB drives. Plus, I got ECC RAM and a way nicer case. Honestly, the software/configuration headache I'd been worried about turned out not to be an issue.

 

[hotaru.hino]

That's kind of apples vs. oranges, though. Unless you have some hardware with a proprietary or non-upstreamed driver that's only supported on a certain distro release, you can usually just upgrade the distro without issue. As for in-tree drivers, Linux is generally way better about not dropping support for old hardware.

I've been running Ubuntu on 6 different PCs (2 of them laptops) for over 12 years, and generally haven't had issues with distro upgrades.

We have to consider things in as much of a vacuum as possible, otherwise this spirals out of control. So for that instance, "support" means how long the the primary maintainer will help you with stuff. Everything else is just a plus.

And I would argue the upgrade process may not be as smooth, even if the next upgrade works fine on your hardware. I let a Ubuntu install lapse several major versions (I think this was over the course of 1.5 to 2 years) and by the time I did want to update it, I couldn't, because they taken down the apt repo and moved it somewhere else, which took a while to figure out how to get that set up. So I ended up doing a complete reinstall.

And then there's my saga of getting a specific version of Python on Linux that was isolated from the internet...

 

[Deleted member 2838871]

I had a good track record, too... until I tried to build an Apollo Lake mini-ITX machine.

Yeah my only issue I've ever had was the Ryzen 7000 series implosion back in mid-April 3 days after I built the PC and even then I was down less than 24 hours and it didn't cost me a nickel. Not even salty about it. 🤣

I do have lots of practice working on this thing though... between the build/rebuild back in April to last night where I removed/reseated the cooler 3 times while I was adding the new offset brackets and testing thermal paste.

It did save me 3C though on my already amazing temps so it was worth it.

Not gonna lie though... even though I could probably do it blindfolded by now I'll be perfectly fine with not working on this PC for the next 5 years. 🤣

 

[MergleBergle]

I may have missed it, but some websites do offer to build a computer for you, you just send them the shopping list of parts you want.

That's how I do it. I mean, I know I could do it myself, but for a full build, having them put it together and install the OS for an extra $50 or so is worth it, since if something goes wrong, it's their fault, not mine, and I don't have to worry about getting it fixed costing me more money. My current system was put together in 2014 and is still going strong (I think it's time for a total system replacement, I've added/changed parts myself since then, but obviously the cpu is getting up there lol)

 

[10tacle]

A few years ago, when my eldest grandson was 11 years old....watching him take a pile of new parts boxes and making a working PC in an afternoon....priceless.
...
2-3 hours later, the glow in his eyes as he pushed the power button and stuff appeared on the monitor...priceless.
...
Opening a Dell box and pressing the button is not even close.

That's it in a nutshell! I never even had any kids but I have helped several friend's kids and a nephew build their first rigs over the years. The sheer satisfaction of that and seeing their joy and motivation to learn more (like the inevitable troubleshooting that will happen) is beyond anything that Dell or HP can box up and ship to their front door. It's just amazing to watch how they grew with that core knowledge which from my perspective at least helped gain their confidence in tackling future challenges in other things as well.

 

[USAFRet]

That's it in a nutshell! I never even had any kids but I have helped several friend's kids and a nephew build their first rigs over the years. The sheer satisfaction of that and seeing their joy and motivation to learn more (like the inevitable troubleshooting that will happen) is beyond anything that Dell or HP can box up and ship to their front door. It's just amazing to watch how they grew with that core knowledge which from my perspective at least helped gain their confidence in tackling future challenges in other things as well.

And I forgot to mention above...he didn't realize he was building his own christmas present.

Christmas Eve when I took it over there and pulled it out of the box..."MOM!! I made this!!!!"

 

[bit_user]

We have to consider things in as much of a vacuum as possible, otherwise this spirals out of control. So for that instance, "support" means how long the the primary maintainer will help you with stuff. Everything else is just a plus.

No, "support" has a very specific meaning, in this context. It's how long they will keep issuing major fixes and security patches.

I let a Ubuntu install lapse several major versions (I think this was over the course of 1.5 to 2 years) and by the time I did want to update it, I couldn't, because they taken down the apt repo and moved it somewhere else,

I hit the same scenario, but with a very different outcome. It upgraded me through a few steps that were also obsolete, before I reached a supported distro version. In my case, everything worked.

And then there's my saga of getting a specific version of Python on Linux that was isolated from the internet...

If you want a sandboxed version of Python, which you independently control, that's not generally something you're going to get from any distro.

What a distro does for you is to provide consistent sets of package versions that are mutually compatible, so that everything on your system plays nicely with everything else on your system.

I suppose one route you could explore is to install your custom Python installation in a container, at which point you should be able to choose a different set of package versions than the rest of your system is using. It will still be the distro's build of Python, so maybe not meeting your "isolated from the internet" requirement.

 

[CeltPC]

The worst problem with pre-built PC's is that you are often not getting either quality or performance anywhere near what the "brand name" and price would suggest you should expect. The most thorough reviews I have seen are from Gamers Nexus.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqK9wR6KMLs&list=PLsuVSmND84QuM2HKzG7ipbIbE_R5EnCLM&index=11

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnvxSkqJ8ic&list=PLsuVSmND84QuM2HKzG7ipbIbE_R5EnCLM&index=6

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ulhFi5N2hc&list=PLsuVSmND84QuM2HKzG7ipbIbE_R5EnCLM&index=18

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtaHNUmQ7Mk&list=PLsuVSmND84QuM2HKzG7ipbIbE_R5EnCLM&index=13


Not every PC they review is bad, but even those that are not are what I would personally want.

I'm no electronic engineer - just a PC user , but have been building my own PC's for a number of years. My experiences have told me the main advantages to the DYI "rolling your own" path are:

1. You actually know what you are getting, selecting components for quality, performance, and value geared specifically to your needs and goals.

2. You know that it is assembled with care, and not thrown together.

3. You are not hamstrung by proprietary designs and parts that makes upgrades difficult if not impossible in some cases.

4. You know that the system is properly configured and set up. It is shocking how badly some PC sellers do at this.

5. You are not paying an exorbitant "tax" to a company, all your money goes into the components. You may not "save" much money in total build cost because you did not take any cost cutting shortcuts, but the value can be far superior.

6. The knowledge you will gain in the process of researching / building will make you a smarter consumer, a better problem solver in dealing with any issues that might arise down the road, and make you better able to optimize and tune your system to your own preferences.

It does not take a tech expert to go DYI, just the patience to do the necessary research, and due care in executing the assembly. If those are not attributes you have or do not care to devote to your PC, by all means buy your PC pre-built. But even then please choose a vendor whose products have a competent review available to avoid disappointment.

 

[sitehostplus]

The only prebuilt I would ever buy (and plan to do so soon for travel) would be a laptop... and that's only because I can't take the desktop with me.

I'll never buy a pre-built desktop again. Speaking of that... are companies like Gateway and Dell still in business?

Unfortunately, yes. And they still build crappy desktops.

I admit to my shame buying a pre-built desktop in like 1997 from Computer City. It was the biggest mistake of my life. After dealing with incompetent tech support, I was forced to replace the motherboard myself.

What's interesting about this is this guy has an almost opposite opinion. Maybe we should help him? 🤗

 

[bit_user]

What's interesting about this is this guy has an almost opposite opinion. Maybe we should help him? 🤗

Since I hate big, heavy, hot, loud laptops, I can't imagine I'd like a gaming laptop.

I always figured they were mostly for students who need a laptop anyway, and maybe like being able to easily take their gaming machine over to their friend's house or wherever. I have difficulty imagining most professionals with the space and budget for a gaming desktop would actually prefer a gaming laptop.

 

[sitehostplus]

I feel the author completely missed the mark in this article. By the time you take to price your parts and get them and put them in a PC you can buy something pre-built but the main thing is the warranty. For 150 bucks you can get a rock solid warranty and not have to worry about anything versus having to go to numerous manufacturers if a park messes up therefore putting together a PC in this time is completely utterly pointless. Peace of mind versus Frankenstein I like sleeping at night.

You sure about that?

Every pre built I've ever looked at was warrantied for 12 months.

My motherboard and CPU are warrantied for 3 years. GPU is warrantied for 4 years. My power supply is warrantied for 10 years. My memory is warrantied for lifetime.

SSD's are both warrantied for 5 years each.

I sleep much better at night knowing my stuff has better warranties.

 

[bit_user]

Every pre built I've ever looked at was warrantied for 12 months.

The Dell Precision machines (laptops & fixed towers) that we use at work come with a 3 year warranty. Most of the time, we get them on a 3-year lease, which seems like it's probably not a coincidence.

Some of the Skylake-generation mid-towers we bought outright, and kept for longer, had the highest failure rate I have ever personally witnessed (many of which failed before the warranty expired!). Just about everything on them failed: motherboards, PSUs, SSDs, and HDDs. And it's not like we have dirty power - nearly all were on a UPS and lots of other machines in our office had typical longevity (nearly all of them other Dell models/generations), even during the same time period.

The CPUs were even just the regular 65W i7-6700 (non-K) and most had no dGPU. We didn't run them hard, either. Just a typical developer usage pattern. No 24/7 long-running CPU jobs, or anything like that.

 

[sitehostplus]

Since I hate big, heavy, hot, loud laptops, I can't imagine I'd like a gaming laptop.

I always figured they were mostly for students who need a laptop anyway, and maybe like being able to easily take their gaming machine over to their friend's house or wherever. I have difficulty imagining most professionals with the space and budget for a gaming desktop would actually prefer a gaming laptop.

I've had laptops before and they ain't half bad.

But I sure would never choose on over my current fire breathing dragon. 🤣