That seems a little too good to be true. The i7 920 is $270 by itself. So that only leaves $500 for case, power supply, motherboard, ram, hard drive, video card, Windows OS and shipping. And they presumably turn a profit too.
So, is this one of those “too good to be true” sort of deals, or is it really a better deal to buy the entire PC? Do these cut-rate places actually put together a good, working PC or are you rolling the dice?
I want to find a good deal, save a few bucks, take advantage of rebates, etc. It doesn’t seem like I can beat the complete PC deal. Didn’t the i7 represent the premium computing tier? How did it become so cheap all of a sudden? Is this the new sweet spot, or is there some kind of catch?
Feel free to chime in with your recent computer purchasing / build experiences, too.
Yep, maybe 10 years ago it was cheaper, but now with the economies of scale the way they are and web-based companies like Dell, with little sales overhead, its usually cheaper to just buy the whole thing.
I wouldn’t doubt that you can buy a pre-built PC cheaper than building your own. However, would you want it? It probably comes with a cheap power supply, cheap case, cheap memory, etc.
If you’re a gamer you might want to build your own. That way you can pick out a good case, power supply, video card, etc. Search Google for “budget gaming computer”, many sites have their own formulas for building a computer, usually with components from newegg.com
Personally I try to stay away from the cutting edge, I buy whatever CPU is $100, get a motherboard and memory to go with it, and spend about $150 on a video card.
I’m not familiar with that company … a quick look at the computer specs showed it has no DVD or CD drive, an obsolete video card that is no longer available at other stores, and an unbranded refurbished hard drive … I quit looking.
I used to build my own. These days when I am buying a new computer I research online to find or work out a system that suits me and then have it built at a local shop. Price is comparable to online and no shipping hassles. And way better than the proprietary Dell / HP kind of crap. Suggest you check out your local mom and pop operations.
Well, they’re not giving you a mouse or keyboard, and you’re stuck with Vista Home Basic.
The power supply is barely enough to power this system (need to upgrade), I don’t know enough about cooling, but there is no case fan (extra), and upgrading the CPU cooling is going to cost you. I suspect that the cooling is minimal too.
It shouldn’t be too difficult to get the various other parts for that $500 – especially if you fill them from the bargain bin like they did with this system.
The cheap PC prices are all come ons. They are there to lurer you into the site, and then get the needed upgrades to actually build a new system. I fell for it when I bought my last system: A cheap Dell Inspiron for $295. By the time I finished upgrading that monkey, and PAYING for shipping, it cost me over $500. And for that, I got a cheap piece of crap. Lousy case, terrible workmanship, and it sounds like a 747 on takeoff.
I could have “overpaid” for a Mac Mini for a few dollars more and gotten an HD graphics card in the process.
If you are interested in gaming (which is why you want the I7 processor and not the dual cores), build your own system. Get the quality parts you need. It’ll cost you more, but you’ll be happier in the end.
I’d suggest looking at the Dell online outlet store. You can usually find very good deals on systems. I recently got a very nice quad core system for my son for son for < $500.
It was a complete system, including mouse and keyboard, in as new condition.
Well, to be fair, they also let you customize the parts, for either more or less money. IBuyPower does the same thing with a bit more selection and they’re not far off on price.
Are you saying all the selections are equally crappy? I don’t need top-of-the-line, just not-crap will do.
I checked Dell and NewEgg, but their prices seemed far higher. Tom’s Hardware seems to indicate the i7 is faster than the AMD or Core 2 systems, but now the prices seems to have come down so it’s in a sweet spot. Maybe these places bought a ton of i7s in bulk?
MicroCenter has been running I7s on special for $199.
I too used to be a cheaper-to-buy-complete guy, but eventually came around to the lessons others have mentioned: building a machine with standardized components lets you choose the level of quality for each of those pieces as you see fit, and lets you swap them out later as desired. Contrast to an older Dell that I have that takes a special power supply, etc.
The PC I use now I bought about 3 years ago, and have since updated the CPU and motherboard, hard drives, and OS (not all at the same time). I think generally speaking that would be more difficult with some vendors’ machines, as they sometimes use customized parts/odd sizes.
No doubt you could scour clearance bins and build a computer with no CD/DVD drive and [similar] obsolete / underpowered / low-end / refurbished parts for less money. No sense putting a decent CPU in it, though.
You’re the one who said “That seems a little too good to be true.” You are absolutely right and I agree 100%. This deal smells bad.
I bought a Dell XPS “gaming” system about a year ago, and it seems to be built from standard components. But it’s a big mini-tower system. The Dell Optiplex systems at work are “small form-factor” systems, and do have proprietary components. But the systems themselves are fairly small, it’s easy enough to swap out parts without needing tools and the systems aren’t normally upgraded.
He didn’t buy a Mac product. He was saying that despite the reputation Macs have in some quarters for being overpriced, the “overpriced” Mac Mini was only slightly more expensive than the “cheap” computer he got, and would have been significantly better.
And before you call Macs overpriced, make sure you’re comparing to a comparable system. A bottom-of-the-line Mac is more expensive than a bottom-of-the-line Dell, but that’s mostly just because Mac’s bottom of the line doesn’t go down as low.
My comment was more a generic reference to anyone who buys a mac, irrespective of what the person I quoted actually bought (sorry for any confusion). The mac is assuredly overpriced, especially when one builds their own system. Slightly more expensive…well, we will get to that in a moment. See below.
Lulz. From apple.com, a macmini with the following config will run $799 (does not include keyboard/mouse/monitor/speakers etc).
Mac mini Intel Core 2 Duo
Configuration
* 2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
* 2GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 2x1GB
* 320GB Serial ATA Drive
* SuperDrive 8x (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
* User's Guide (English)
* Accessory kit
Do you really think I can’t go to newegg and build a system with a comparable processor, more HDD space, the same or more memory, an actual video card (not an onboard POS sharing RAM with the CPU) and an 18-24x DVDR/RW/CD/RW for less than $600 shipped? I bet I can even get a 7.1 surround-sound sound card and buy the OS for less than the mac. Nevermind the $900 monitor apple tries to push…
I’ll echo what many have said - if you are buying a computer for general use (internet, email, photos), then yeah, you can get a pre-built machine for about the same or less than the cost of the parts. If if would like performance, and upgradeability, then building your own is the way to go.
When a family member asks me to help them buy a new PC, I ask their usage and budget, then go look at Dell. When I’m building my own machine, I take the time to find parts and build myself…
Home theater PCs are still worth building yourself. All the extra features you want (Blu-Ray, HDMI out, digital out, remote control) are fairly inexpensive in parts, but are charged a premium by manufactures. You can save several hundred dollars building your own.
Actually, in many games a fast dual core like a Core 2 Duo E8400 or a triple core like a Phenom II 720 will end up being just as fast, if not faster than a Core i7 920. See these benchmarks. And that is with the same video card; with the savings of going with a cheaper processor (that need much cheaper motherboards, as well) one can get a better video card, which is the most important thing for gaming.
Note that the Core i7 is a beast for workstation type tasks, so if you do a lot of video editing or rendering, a Core i7 may well be worth the money.
I have building my own computers for decades. Every few years I take a look at pre-built units and think, “Why bust my balls putting everything together?”
But every time I buy a pre-built unit, I regret it afterwards, for some of these reasons:[ol][]Just because someone else built it doesn’t mean the parts work together, and I end up having to debug it anyway.[]If I build it, I can fix it later without a hassle because I know how it went together.Pre-built units usually come with tons of unwanted stuff like software that nags you to buy more, or functions turned on that I would never want. It takes time to remove all this and disable the junk.[/ol]
I can’t stress this enough. Before you pay for a quad-core super-turbo-whatever, ask yourself why you need a quad-core super-turbo CPU.
Are you really doing protein folding calculations, photo-realistic 3-D rendering, or nuclear explosion simulations?
Or are you surfing the web, checking e-mail, writing papers, downloading and editing music and maybe doing some light photoshop?
If the latter, then a five-year old CPU should work fine. Heck, a five-year old computer (though I’d replace any hard drive that’s been used for five years).
Now, if you’re really into the newest computer games, you might want the newest graphics card, but for everyone else, a cutting edge system is a waste of money.
