Updating the 'puter for hardcore ownage

[--Pete]

Hi,

. . . I went to Fry's Electronics and local computer expo's to find the cheapest prices available.

That's part of the problem. I live about 10 minutes from a Fry's, and I only use them for minor purchases because I can always get what I want for considerably less online (the outlandish Washington state sales tax contributes a lot to this). You can almost always beat local prices at Newegg, and beat them a lot by searching, for instance, Cnet.

. . . My computer price for doing this myself? $2,200.00. . . .

Wow (and not the game:)) A couple of years ago, I got the components for *two* machines that were pretty well the equivalent for about $2500. The whole process is detailed in this ancient thread. (And, no, I still haven't finished assembling the second machine:()

Had I of bought a Dell *at this point in time*, I could have gotten one with not quite as powerful a video card but everything else + a monitor + speakers + Windows XP for the exact same price or lower. It was the thrill of building my own computer that made up for the price, but that was it.

But here is where the point I'm trying to make comes in. The Dell system would not have had the same quality components as what you built. If you had built your system with Dell quality components, it would probably (with a little bit of online shopping) have cost you no more than Dell prices, and maybe even a bit less.

As you might have heard, I made fairly recent upgrades (within the last year) and purchased a new video card and ditched the 2xSLI format (not much improvement at all from using 2x SLI cards of lower stock than using one next gen video card), upgraded to 4-GB of RAM, and got the dual-core processor + heatsink. I ended up spending about another $800.00-$900.00 for "used" parts; had I of bought these new, I'm sure the price would of been much higher.

Again, this sounds high, but without specific info on the processor and video card, it's hard to tell. Check out Newegg to see how these prices compare.

Total price for this computer: $3,000.00. Using Alienware as an example, I could have gotten the same computer (+windows, but w/out a monitor) for roughly the same price! No, if your purchasing top-of-the-line components, I don't believe you will save money building your own computer, or at least not that much more.

Not fair! The $3000 includes replacing the video card and CPU. At the very least, you need to subtract the cost of the originals from the total, since they are no longer in the machine.

I've actually taken the time and trouble to compare the cost on three occasions, once when I was building game machines for Magi and me, and twice when other people asked me to build a machine for them. Each time, *for the same components*, I could build cheaper. It might even be a fun exercise for the Loungers to pick some pre-built that has enough info to compare, and see what we can find from the parts people. I bet it's still cheaper to build.

--Pete