Is it still possible to buy online a customized computer at a decent price?
Dell used to let you customize pretty much every component of your desktop. It seems they don’t anymore. Is there anyway to get a computer like this online?
I know I could go to a computer store and have one built for me but I’m interested in finding a online seller where I can select all the features I want and a desktop sold and sent to me at a decent price.
A detailed web address instead of solely a manufacturer/retailer name would be helpful. Especially because I had read that HP offers what I’m looking for but when I go to “desktops” on their site and click on “customize” it doesn’t seem to offer any customizing.
Buy these components yourself and asselmble them. What’s so hard about this? Go to sites like Amazon and order all of them in one shipment that’s the way to do it. If you order it from computer shops they of course will charge you premiums.
For me, assembling the components is not that hard. It’s configuring the computer where I could run into trouble. For some that would be a piece of cake. But I worry that if I don’t ‘dot all the “i’s” and cross all the “t’s”’ when setting up all the drivers, etc., that the thing won’t work just right.
I’ve had very good results with iBuyPower in the past, but it’s been some years since then. Most of the cases you’ll immediately notice will look like the awkward spawn of a Transformer and a Cylon, but there should be some less garish case options you can substitute. Once you’ve custom configured the whole system just the way you want it, head on over to Walmart.com and see if they’ve got essentially the same thing among their preconfigured iBuyPower options for a possibly better price with free shipping using “Site to Store” in-store pickup.
Walmart.com used to offer their systems with some minimal customization options, but it appears they did away with that. I bought custom PCs directly from iBuyPower before they started selling through Walmart, and I’ve bought one of their canned PCs from Walmart. Top quality, name brand components and zero issues, either way.
While this can be answered factually, that will limit responses to simply listing available sites for custom builds. Let’s move this to IMHO where people can give their opinions about different sites and can also offer advice and share personal experiences.
Moving thread from General Questions to In My Humble Opinion.
Can you be more specific about what it is you want to customize that the big vendors don’t let you select?
Even Apple, which sells a pretty limited line of systems, will generally let you customize the processor, the amount of memory, the HDD/SDD storage, and (sometimes) the video card/chip in most of their computers. I’m sure Dell and HP and any other vendor have similar or greater customization options available.
Do you want to pick the power supply and the system fan and the color of the cables?
Yeah, this. Frankly, those are more choices that you really need; what’s the point in choosing an HDD? Unless your hobby is making (and keeping) thousands of different edits of full-length movies, or downloading all of Wikipedia or something, then you’ll be just fine with whatever HDD they give you.
CyberPowerPC also lets you customize. I’ve never used them to vouch for them but they are, as I recall, iBuyPower’s main competitor in that market.
I build my own computers and will say that, if you don’t want to do it yourself, then don’t. You don’t really save that much these days and a single hassle can cost you hours or days of annoyance with troubleshooting and potentially waiting to RMA components. First system I built had a bad PSU shipped to me – had to send that back and wait on it because it was part of a bundle so I couldn’t just return it without forfeiting the bundle savings. I put another together where the motherboard and CPU were nominally compatible except that you had to flash the BIOS on the board for that specific processor, knowledge that didn’t come easily. I recently switched out a PSU on this system and got the ever-so-fun “Press power and nothing happens” (that was thankfully easy to troubleshoot).
That’s not to scare anyone off and I think there’s value in doing it but I don’t think there’s shame in wanting a system already configured, put together, tested and under a single warranty right out of the box.
I want to be clear that I’m not making a value judgment on whether it’s reasonable to want to customize those things. If the OP wants a system builder who will let him/her pick the model of hard drive or the length of the cables, great. I’ve built systems for myself before, and I had to pick all the parts from scratch, and I got exactly the system I wanted. These days, I’m content to mostly not care, but that doesn’t mean someone else shouldn’t care.
I was just confused by the claim that Dell doesn’t let you customize a system, since it lets you customize lots of stuff. So if we get a clear idea of what the OP wants, we can make a better recommendation.
