Computer Build

One "average" (dollar amount or percentage) how much does one save by building the pc, vs purchasing the equivalent pc?

This can really vary - on inexpensive builds, that is on machines that are less than $600 or so I would estimate you could save at least $150 depending upon the components you select. And that last is the rub: what sort of money/quality do you want to put into all of the pieces and parts.

Now on higher end machines the savings will be hundreds, at the very least. I had been considering a higher end Dell machine but could only find something "close" in their XPS/Alienware configurations. It would have been over $3K, and still not what I wanted. Instead, I got all the components at Microcenter, a very nice case and a higher end build with SSD for my boot drive plus a 2TB disk drive for all my data, and a lot of other stuff, and it came in under $2,200. That does not include the monitor though which I already have (2 of them).

So it all depends upon what you are trying to build/achieve.

Nothing. The point about building is that you get better quality components.

Check out this lengthy thread:

https://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthre​ad.php?t=576828

Skip to the last couple of weeks and you'll get a pretty good idea of what people are getting for their money. And from what I can tell, these are some very capable machines .

Two biggest reason I build my own PC's are I control the quality of parts and the ease of future upgrades. No cramped cases and proprietary connectors to deal with.

uOpt wrote in post #13947673
Nothing. The point about building is that you get better quality components.

This is what I'm finding while doing research on building my own. Looks like I'm not really going to save any money, but I will get exactly what I want, and it will be much more upgradeable than anything I can buy from Dell, HP etc.

I reckon the savings from buying individual components is somewhere between 25% - 50%.

These components were $1400 in June 2011. I priced a similar system from Dell for $2000. And of course the prices just keep coming down. I spot checked these components at the first of the year and they were ~$1100.

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Mahgnillig wrote in post #13948196
This is what I'm finding while doing research on building my own. Looks like I'm not really going to save any money, but I will get exactly what I want, and it will be much more upgradeable than anything I can buy from Dell, HP etc.

Not to mention it won't blow a PSU every 7 months...

I used to build all mine.. Since I stopped gaming I just buy dell now, much less work up front and only about an hour of. Rap to remove when it comes in

mike4066 wrote in post #13951785
I used to build all mine.. Since I stopped gaming I just buy dell now, much less work up front and only about an hour of. Rap to remove when it comes in

Tbh I kinda miss building them and find myself checking out hardware and and a pricing out my dream machine

uOpt wrote in post #13948233
Not to mention it won't blow a PSU every 7 months...

Were those PS's defective units or were they just inexpensive vendor builds?

sapearl wrote in post #13959677
Were those PS's defective units or were they just inexpensive vendor builds?

My wife bought a small format Dell with a non-standard PSU and it blow it every now and then. I'll have to move it into a new case (with standard PSU) next time since I'm not gonna spend the money *again*, not to mention the work that went into that game already is more than building one is.

At work we had a batch of workstations with some crap Sparkle PSUs that blew up 20 or so of them. The best part is that due to company policy we couldn't just buy better PSU's, the had to RMA the crap and get new ones of the faulty things with the famous capacitors. Guess what we spend multiple times what better PSUs would have cost in exchanging PSUs in many workstations several times.

And just for those who don't know it: insufficient power causes memory corruption since the RAM can't hold on to the contents and the CPU changes bits as they flow through it. Via the filesystem buffer cache memory corruption will cause filesystem corruption and due to the way that data versus metadata is (not) separated here you can kill any file on the filesystem even if you didn't touch it. Everybody who writes to the disk a lot (let's say photo people who use raw files a lot or just many pictures) and doesn't watch out for it is data-suicidal.

The best part of it is that many people use a single-shot backup system such as a USB drive, so if they have silent data corruption on the main computer they'll never learn until about it until they have overwritten all the backups and lost their pictures.

[Insert ECC memory nagging here]