As a geek my completely biased opinion was that pre-built computers were terrible and should never be purchased by a self respecting geek. With more than 20 years behind that original thought I think its about time that we re-visit this.
Lets start off with our custom built computer that was built at $1500
- Intel I7 6700 Skylake
- Mid-high level Z170 Gigabyte motherboard
- 16GB corsair vengeance 2666
- 2TB hybrid SSHD
- EVGA 750Watt super nova power supply
- Blue-ray burner
- Windows 10
- EVGA GTX1070 SC black edition
- Thermaltake AC71 LCS case
The Beautiful AC71 LCS
Now lets take a look at a few competitors to this price range; first up, we have the Alienware Aurora R5 priced right now at $1400
- Same processor
- unknown motherboard
- same size RAM at unknown speeds
- 1TB smaller drive with a 256 SSD instead
- completely unknown power supply
- no blue-ray player
- Same OS
- GTX 1070 at unknown speeds
- No water cooling in the case
So whats the end result? We get a very similar build with very small differences. You know what you put into the custom PC down to the MHz of every item in the computer. So is the Alienware a good deal? I’d say sure, I guess but i’m not excited about it.
Next up we have the Cyberpower PC name simply “VR ready deal”. This comes in at $1409 right now.
- Intel I7 6700K (this ones allows for easy overclocking)
- MSI Z170 motherboard with an unknown model
- half the RAM at 3000MHz instead of 2666 MHz
- 2TB smaller drive, only has a 128GB SSD
- Completely unknown power supply
- No optical drive at all
- Same OS
- GTX 1070 at unknown speeds
- Hundreds of case options for this build
So this computer puts up a few sacrifices for a very few small upgrades in speed; such as the RAM and the SSD. 128GB of space is less than my tablet has and to imagine that its sufficient for any build is crazy.
I did some further research and found that for a good portion of the potential builds are all just about the same pricing scheme with some variants between the different manufactures. Overall I felt like the custom built machine was slightly better but not entirely better is every way.
So why would some one buy one of these? These offer a support line for those who may not be able to fix their own issues. This also offers a quick out for those that don’t want to spend countless hours researching. You have price for performance parts and deciding what works best for building VMs while playing games and so on and so on. I spend hours and hours of time playing with different web sites and pricing and researching, but I love every moment of it. For me I still don’t think its worth the pre-built machines but if you don’t find the same passion in browsing parts like I do it might just be worth picking up that simple option. Happy hunting for your new PC.
This helps. Thanks!