As others have mentioned, the glory days of system builders and saving a bundle by building yourself or hiring the local geek or local shop has past. Now, you can still build a system, but you’ll be paying quite a bit. It may be worth it for uber gamers who want a well upgradeable system (e.g. one that you are confident will accept the most leet 2014 graphics cards…). If you are into robotics it also might be helpful, both in terms of general experience hooking up and troubleshooting parts as well as giving you transferable knowledge about very high-level computer design that may transfer.
Price issues are a good point. I don’t fool with building a basic pc anymore. Walmart sells them by the truckload dirt cheap.
I design and build workstations. Machines that can run sophisticated video editing packages like Adobe Premier and After Effects. Or CAD programs that we use in the computer labs.
Thanks for the advice so far everyone. And thanks Princhester. All across Umart, that’s where I grabbed my HDD from the other week. Agree - Great prices.
As an aside, I notice a lot of you suggesting price isn’t a real benefit anymore. I think this may be another instance of Aussies getting screwed on price. I’ve sketched out an idea of what I’d like to put together, and pricing it on Umart (a local component supplier) and the components are costing $770. I couldn’t get a premade system from a retailer in Oz with those specs for under $1k.
At the moment I’m looking at an i5 chip, 8G RAM, and a decent Video card (~1G). Everyone has already potentially saved me, as I was not aware that different motherboards require different RAM chips.
Regarding price - and it was touche don with the case thing - for me the saving really comes later on. When you are comfortable taking apart things it is VERY easy to do wholescale upgrades but still use various bits, especially the case.
As an example, I have a huge full tower case (it currently has six hard drives in it). I’ve had it since around 1998, when it housed a Pentium 2. I recently moved back to PC gaming from consoles and built a gaming rig. I used the same case, but now it has an Quad Core i5 in it. OK, I had to buy a motherboard, processor and memory (which came as an “upgrade pack” from a shop), a new PSU and HD, but that was it. No monitor, keyboard, mouse or case. That’s a saving there.
Yes, you do get cases that can be (sometimes) upgraded the same way with off the shelf PCs, but the cases are all too often small and pokey and, well, shit. Mine is solid, roomy and has lasted 13 years. And because of what I learnt when building the machine I have no problems pulling out other bits and swapping them around.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that the two main benefits are learning stuff so you are comfortable with upgrading later and being able to choose the exact, quality components you want. The money saving is, for me, as over the years thing as you repurpose stuff. After a while you’ll realise you have enough bits lying around to be able to build another computer which you can have kicking around as a server, for LAN gaming, for your kids, for the wife …
GreedySmurf I just ordered all the bits for mine tonight. You might be interested to know that I did a price survey for every component and with a single exception umart was cheapest. And on the exception they were about $2 more, so not worth even worrying about going elsewhere.
Well nowadays every new computer will use DDR3 so there’s not a whole lot to worry in terms of picking out RAM. Worst case, you might buy slower RAM that makes your system perform 1% below its true potential.
Also, which video card are you looking at? There are shit cards with 1 gb of memory, there are good but perhaps overpriced cards, and there are some which provide great bang/buck especially if you find a sale.
A big part of the savings for me was avoiding the Microsoft tax. A certain chunk of the price of prebuilt computers usually includes Windows. If you are going to run Windows, build your own computer, and you have to pay for Window, likely bundled with IE, Office, Outlook, etc. Add the price of the softwart to the price of the hardware, and Walmart, Staples, or Tiger Direct come close. Black Friday is coming.
For a video card I’m now looking at a Sapphire HD6850 1G GDDR5 PCIE HDMI DP. Reviews and what not I’ve read indicate it’s a good card for its price. And Sapphire seems to be a good brand.
I haven’t kept up on card specs so I can’t comment there, but Sapphire is good. I’m partial to Asus and sometimes Gigabyte, but that’s more personal preference and familiarity than any real quantifiable difference between them and Sapphire. Do avoid off-brand computer parts, they tend to be exceedingly cheap with very bad warranty service.
So this could be a stupid question, but all the cabling required to connect the components to the motherboard and a power supply. Do I need to buy these separately? Or does the cabling generally come with the motherboard?
Yes and no. The PSU will (should) come with plenty of cables and splitters and each hard drive should also come with it’s own data cable.
You may end up needing to make a run to a store if you find that you need to pick up an extra splitter because you have one more fan then fan connection or your data cable from your HDD just isn’t quite long enough to reach (or something else along those lines).
look at the details of the supply for how many cables, how long are they (you need to reach some distance on some motherboards and to case fans), how many and what type of connectors.
you buy what matches your needs. extenders and splitters can be purchased if more are needed.
some quality supplies even have some of the cables removable, you can put in place what you need.
My first PC was a Gateway (2000) 386DX-25 circa 1991 with Windows 3.0 for a cool $2K! Bought it right as the PC boom was taking off and 386s were quickly made obsolete by the 486. Got a (again Gateway2000) 486SX-33 the following year. Was actually able to upgrade that with Intel’s Overdrive thingy and bigger hard drives, so I kept that one viable for many years.
When it was finally time to upgrade I knew enough to start building them myself. Also, Intel then had competition so I think my first Pentium class PC had a Cyrix processor (they’re not even around anymore!) The good thing about building them yourself back then is you could upgrade it piecemeal and save money. You always had to do the CPU and MB together, but video and storage and power and, for awhile, even memory were all reusable with newer main hardware. I continued doing this until only about two years ago, when it just wasn’t worth the money or hassle to build one.
But you know what was probably the biggest cost factor causing this? Having to buy Windows! Once XP introduced product activation you couldn’t play fast & loose with your OS anymore. Now, if you wanted to build your own computer you always had to add $100 (or more) to the price for the OS. Not that I always borrowed my copy of Windows, half the time I just reinstalled my old OS disc (or disks!) onto my new hardware. But XP made even that tricky. Not that I’m complaining about Microsoft, but even today, installing the OS yourself is hardly a simple thing. Sometimes it’s **harder **than installing all the hardware! Back in the day, once Windows 95 & 98 came out, god help you if your BIOS didn’t support booting from CDROM!
Since a new PC is now well under $400 *and *always includes a legit copy of the latest version of Windows, building one myself is more trouble (and money) than its worth.
A HD6850 is a current, near-top-end card. Tom’s Hardware is a good site with frequent “roundups” of components like graphic cards from different manufacturers. In general, with high-end video cards, you get some that are “reference designs” supplied by the chip maker (ATI/AMD in this case), some that are slightly-modified reference designs (different cooler layout, different connection types, possibly more or less memory). But in order to be able to use the “Powered by ATI” logo, they all have to work properly with the stock Catalyst drivers that come out every month.
Even the bad stuff has gotten a lot better. I once had a teleconference with the translator for the head designer of the Symphony ISA + VLB chipset. He felt that the crashes I was seeing after a few days of Unix uptime wouldn’t matter to most of his users who were running Windows 3, since Windows would fail long before the chipset bugs (which, IIRC, were in the area of cache coherency) would crash the system. I even pointed out that the immediately prior chipset (same, but without the VLB) didn’t have the problem. And who can forget the fake 16550 chips which were plain old 8250 parts with fake internal registers so they could pretend to be 16550’s? Or “Logic Parity” memory (it is cheaper to fake a parity bit than actually have one, on a system that needs parity).
For desktop / deskside systems, I either buy new systems from Dell (if you buy on the small business side or larger, you don’t get loads of trial software dumped on your hard drive) or buy “barebones” boxes from the people who dumpster-dive outside Dell and sell on eBay, and then finish them myself. Right now I’ve got 4 Optiplex 960’s built this way.
For most business functions, I buy higher-spec systems, generally from Dell, such as the PowerEdge R300 line (have 3).
For stuff where I have to absolutely have the last word in what goes into the box, I start from scratch. Here’s an example: Pic 1 Pic 2
These are hugely fast fileservers - 32TB of RAID storage, 48GB ECC RAM, dual E5520 CPUs, 256GB PCIe SSD, separate mirrored 320GB drives for OS, dual SAS links to a robotic tape library, and the most extensive hardware manageability you’re likely to have ever seen, all integrated into a customized rack chassis.
On the Dell servers, I’m running FreeBSD, so I just select the “No OS” option and save a bunch of money. Since I’m building the fileservers from scratch, there’s no OS to pay for there, either.
In my experience hard drives never come with any cables.
Maybe if you buy them in a nice box you get them, but most hardware shops I have used sold the OEM-style, simply packed in an anti-static bag.
This is the first thing that popped up when I searched for a hard drive at Best Buy.
“Interface cable, Serial ATA power cable, diagnostic software, installation guide and mounting screws included”
Are you talking about the boot sequence? You can easily change these settings in the BIOS, you don’t need to unplug the floppy drive to not have it in the boot sequence.
But it is always a good idea to have a device other then the HDD to boot from first. What used to be the floppy drive is now usually the cd/dvd drive, so that whenever you OS or HDD won’t start up anymore you can always start up with a bootable cd/dvd.
Whereas this is the current first link when one clicks on “Hard Disks” at amazon.co.uk. TO quote one of the reviewers:
self serve stores might only stock the retail box with lots of packing, cables, screws and CD.
stores that do repairs might carry the bulk package used by OEM as replacements with no additional parts.
mail order you can find both so shop carefully.
This is not an insubstantial consideration.
I myself have a home-built desktop gaming rig that, like Joey P’s, is the evolution of something that has contained one or more parts from a previous iteration going back ten years or more.
You can get good prices on components from different sources if you’re willing to run around and do the legwork, but for a bog-standard PC, it’s really hard to beat pre-built systems if you’re trying to factor in the price of the software (especially a Windows operating system) as part of the deal.
If I had to pay for Windows 7, I don’t think I could build a comparable low-end system for less money than I could buy one at a decent sale, even if I got all my other goodies for less than retail.
Now, a fairly powerful gaming rig - that’s a totally different story. Because that’s not what most people need or are even willing to consider looking at (“Honey, why should we spend $3000.00 on this AlienWare computer when you can get this eMachines one for $250.00 if you’re willing to wait for Black Friday?”), that kinda stuff costs you a premium. It factors in the kind of technical knowledge that wouldn’t even make sense to 99% of the consumer market.