We’ve been talking to someone over there, he’s very friendly and answers all of our questions promptly. The price is right.
However, when you type in their name in a web search, you see no other websites, reviews, or other mention of them, so we don’t really have any way of objective fact-checking.
They only take payment through PayPal.
Any Dopers that have heard of this company, or even done business with them?
I seem to remember the name; I’ve definitely heard of them before. I’ve never done business with them, though, and I’ve never heard any specific reviews of them. I guess they’re just a fairly small outfit.
As for their product and price point, they seem pretty reasonable. I tossed together one of their “extreme” (not really all that extreme, but hey) gaming PCs with a few reasonable upgrades, and the price came out to around $1600, which was about $350 more than what it would cost to buy the components from Newegg and assemble it yourself. That seems like a reasonable markup, especially if you’re particularly averse to putting together a PC yourself. It’s downright cheap compared to Dell; they pad the price on their gaming rigs by as much as $1000 and more. (Want to pay $2600 for a computer you could assemble yourself for $1400? Buy a Dell! :p)
Paying through Paypal would be a big red flag for me. Always pay by credit card, so consumer protection laws apply.
I build my own PCs, but to those who ask about buying them ready-built, I say that the only third-tier suppliers you should consider are those physically close to you.
Never heard of them. You don’t have any hardware-literate friends that could help you build a PC? I’m in the process of building my own. I’m probably going to use this motherboard instead of the one I originally posted, this power supply, in addition to the stuff I listed on my OP there.
So for $1000 I’ll have a 2.53ghz CPU that can be cranked up to 3.16, 4gb RAM, a diamond Radeon 4870, a mobo with two 16x pci 2 lanes and power supply that will support a second 4870 You could get a better dual core CPU (or get a quad core) and another radeon 4870 so maybe 1300 or so total. Or go Nvidia (you’d need a different board) and get a couple of the new 260’s.
Are you getting a monitor with your rig, or do you have one already?
You could also get a barebones, which will usually have a case, power supply, motherboard, and CPU. You’d need to add the drives, memory, and a graphics card, all of which is pretty easy to do. These don’t always have the best power supplies, so you might need one of those too. Newegg sells some decent barebones, and I got one from ecollegePC.com a while back and had great results with it. It’s a nice way to get your feet wet with PC building without having to install everything yourself. And if you’re capable of pricing parts on newegg, you should be able to at least do a barebones build.
If you’re absolutely not capable of building it yourself, or you just don’t want to, I’d try to scope the company out a little more first. Or consider buying a system from a better known buyer. I’ve been buying a lot of parts from newegg lately, they always seem to have good prices and I haven’t had any problems yet.
Main thing is, plan the system out first and get an idea what you want. Do you want dual or quad cores? AMD or Pentium? Nvidia or Radeon? Are you going with 2 graphics cards? If you’re not 100% up to date on the hardware, have someone else spec it out and make sure your system doesn’t have any incompatibilites, Like Nvidia cards on a crossfire board.
The web site is registered to someone in California:
All other details go to a private registration system.
Have you visited their location or only spoken to them over the phone? Why only Paypal and not credit cards for payment? Have you asked them about references? Why do you want to buy from them? Did you just happen to find their web site or was it a result of a recommendation?
I suggest you look at TigerDirect and Newegg. You will not be dissappointed.