Home Grown or Boxed PCs?

Magorak asks: "Like myself, I know there's a lot of people out there who have built their own PC from the ground up. But, I also have friends who just went out and bought a boxed package that came with everything. I've always said that if you build your own PC, with exactly what you want, you'll have the best machine. But PC packages from Dell, Gateway and others are pretty promising so I'm not so sure anymore. I'm curious what Slashdotters think? " A while ago, I would have always suggested the custom solution, but this might not be so true anymore. Are there still places where the custom PC builder can still get a better deal than through Dell, Gateway and others of the sort?

Comments

Beware of homebrew

[drix]

I'm going to go against the flow here and recommend that you buy a ready-built computer. I've done both, and if there's one thing I've noticed about my HPs and Dells it's that they crash less. True, they may not have every speed tweak or the latest incantation of UDMA on board, but the extra money you pay for is assurance that they will work. I say this after a few horrendous experiences with my latest machine:
1. Bought a whiz-bang 3D card with all the trimmings. Couldn't get it to work for two weeks until I found out that the Taiwanese motherboard I'm using (also top of the line) has a BIOS problem with my brand of video card. Waited another few weeks for them to come up with a fix - tech support from any Taiwanese mobo maker, is, IMHO, a complete joke, whether by phone or e-mail.
2. Lots of annoying problems with cooling. If there is on virtue to the non-acessible cases that any major PC maker uses, it's that they're custom engineered with great cooling support. My HP Pavilion has punchouts for a fan duct that blows straight onto the heatsink for the chip, and another fan to whisk all that air right out of the case. In addition, the fans both had little chips sitting next to them which would shut off if the temperature was low enough that they weren't needed. I haven't seen these anywhere. Having a virtually silent machine when you sleep next to it at night is great.
In contrast, cooling on a homebrew machine is, erm, interesting to say the least. With all the motherboard/case combinations out there, it's a given that in some cases it will be impossible to direct air to the CPU without a lot of drilling and taping fans all over. I prefer the elegant, well thought out design of a commerical computer to the homebrew option which is typical to stick 4 or 5 80cms in there and hope for the best.
3. Just the little things. It turns out that the gamma correction software installed by my video card kills my MX300 sound card. That was a fun reinstall, trying to figure out what went wrong. Good computer co's test and retest their base configuration to prevent things like this happening, even to the point of trying every possible order for installing software to determine what works best.
4. Warranty - having a separate warranty on every piece of hardware in your system is no fun. Imagine a crash two years out finding out that your CPU is covered but your hard drive ain't. Doh.

That being said, my next computer will be built by me, of course :) But I wouldn't reccomend it for the inexperienced user. If you know a lot about troubleshooting and really need the fastest rig your money can buy, go for it. Otherwise, get something you know will work.

--

I prefer building

[jfunk]

I'm the type that wants that specific video card (always Matrox), specific motherboard, NIC, *no modem*, and all the hardware must work in Linux.

That gets quite painful when buying packages. The packages always have cut corners. I've watched the quality of Dells sink to new lows lately. At my last job I had a 2-year-old Dell that had a Sony CDROM in it. I would have *never* bought a Sony CDROM ever. This one wouldn't read CDs most of the time. I had to use another one over the network. I have also noticed that the WD hard drives in them get lots of bad sectors at a very early age. Actually, they were the only hard drives I have personally seen with bad sectors ever.

If you want to go with boxed solutions, make sure that you know exactly what's in it, and get a guarantee that you can trade components if they don't work for your OS of choice (believe it or not, I was able to get these guarantees in the kernel 1.2 days).