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General discussion

What About Having a PC Custom Built?

Jan 31, 2014 2:38AM PST

I've had a few conversations about doing this in lieu of buying from a big manufacturer.

The benefits being extolled are that you can customize and get exactly what you want. More importantly, some folks have said that one can get individual components (e.g., hard drive, motherboard, etc) of higher quality than those used by the mass manufacturers. Finally, some have said it works out to not only be better from a quality standpoint, but cheaper as well.

In my area, there is a store from a nationwide chain that does this -- Micro Center. Perhaps there are others that I'm not aware of.

I'd be grateful to hear perspectives on the pros and cons of doing a custom build, and certainly also to hear if anyone has anything good or bad to say about Micro Center.

Discussion is locked

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I live close to one of their stores
Jan 31, 2014 3:17AM PST

I like Micro Center. I've bought two desktops and a laptop from them in the last two years, and have no complaints. However I don't believe you save money over buying from a major manufacturer like Dell, Toshiba, or Asus. I watch the ads from other stores (especially Fry's) and look for bargains where I can find them, but I find Micro Center's prices to be competitive and the people there to be good. I've never used their service dept. because I'm my own tech, but I have had to exchange a few components I've bought, and never had a complaint. I've been dealing with them since 1989.

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I'll second some of what wpgwpg said
Jan 31, 2014 6:31AM PST

but I won't have Microcenter build me a PC. Rather, I might buy the parts there and put it together myself unless they'd do it for me with the parts I select at no build up price. Microcenter actually started in my home city and grew from there. I visited their first store over and over. Unlike places like Best Buy and Circuit City, I found their people to be quite knowledgeable and helpful. I can't say the same for Circuit City, CompUSA and such. Microcenter is very good for some things. They do have their own brand of PCs and laptops but I'll rate the quality of these as being so-so. I believe these are called "Power Spec" and "Winbook". A reliable smaller shop is, IMO, a better choice. Here's what I've found. I do some support work for a small school and we have their PCs built by a smaller operation that specializes in just that. If you can find such a builder, you're in luck. This one gives us a very lengthy labor warranty so they don't use junk parts because the warranty repair would kill them. Their PCs tend to be built with either ASUS or Intel MBs. Over the many years, we've had them do nearly 100 PCs. Our total number of failures have been 2 HDs and 1 MB (which was already about 5 years old). That speaks well for them. Microcenter might build you a PC but they'll also hit you up for extended care. I will rate Microcenter very good for having a lot of inventory to choose from but I think you can do better elsewhere with having a PC made if you are uncomfortable with buying the parts and putting it together yourself. As for pricing, I've found Microcenter to be very competitive with most of the internet shops when it comes to motherboards, CPUs, hard drives, etc. I do buy parts there. Hope this helps and good luck.

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(NT) Good stuff -- thanks to all!
Feb 2, 2014 12:09AM PST
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Try online store's too!!
Feb 6, 2014 6:19PM PST

yeah!! building a custom PC is much more cheaper than buying from a company and you can fufill all your required cofiguration!!! i mean if you want to use the pc for gaming or for the the normal use there are wide options you can check...even on net you can check on the various sites like amazon!!! gives you the few links!! check them too..

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Delectronics&field-keywords=sf+cable+computer+hardware&rh=n%3A172282%2Ck%3Asf+cable+computer+hardware

Hope you will find all your requirment!!! Blush

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Don't think at the low end it's worth it.
Feb 11, 2014 10:03AM PST

Unfortunately you can't really make blanket statements like 'works out cheaper or better quality', because it's not necessarily true especially at the low end.

A custom PC can be outfitted to your exact need or circumstances. For example, if you're on an extreme budget and want to pair a low-end CPU with an upper-midrange graphics card for the maximum gaming bang for the buck, you couldn't turn a low-end prebuilt PC to this task because such PC's would have a small power supply which wouldn't be able to power the graphics card. I'm not sure what your budget is, but I'm assuming it's low. In this case getting someone else to build is really of debatable benefit, money-wise. You're better off building your own to maximise the budget.

There is a tradeoff though. Obviously at the low end, components aren't any different - or in some cases are inferior to - parts fitted to 'mass market' PC's. You're just fitting different combinations of parts. And while any small-time maker or user can simply assemble a PC by buying the relevant bits, that they'll be as stable as something built by a maker with a rep to uphold built and tested in a predictable configuration is something else altogether. In fact most, if not all, of the stability issues experienced by gamers who build their own systems even if they've assembled everything correctly is due to the fact that they don't understand cooling... but they'll blame Microsoft/NVidia/Intel/AMD/etc anyway.

The real benefits of custom comes when you have a few thousand and above to play around with - then there are a whole bunch of guys like Puget Systems, Velocity Micro, Maingear, etc who will outfit your system with custom but proven parts and build it like the best enthusiasts do. Below that at the bottom-feeder level, I'd say definitely do it yourself.