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'White Box' Makers Take Up The Slack
n3hat writes: "This story in the business section of the Baltimore Sun points out that the 'pooter bidness isn't as bad as the publicly-traded companies report. Seems that as much as 45% of systems are assembled by screwdriver shops and other white-box makers, not the big guys." No huge surprises here.
I used to work for a company and we built some machines. To be honest there was absolutely no way to compete with Dells and the like on price. The only reason we built systems was to service our regular consultant business. For the most part we only built systems for business customers. Some just demanded the best most stable systems, others had special needs. For instance high end graphic design workstations, and some servers. Sometimes we would build them for sound studios and such. If someone wanted a regular system we would just sell them a retail HP or IBM, it was cheaper for them and more profitable for us.
Our component cost often exceeded the cost of a whole Dell system, but we cherry picked only the nicest most stable stuff. Even considering that we generally favored. You can buy a $10 power supply, or you can get a $50 Antec. Chances are that $10 supply will fail in a week while the Antec will last 5 years. Ditto for graphics cards, (second most failure prone component.) Frankly the cost of having a productive worker without his computer for a day or more exceeds the cost of getting a good computer to begin with.
If you find a white box system cheaper than a Dell you better be pretty suspect of what is in it.
With the price of RAM, hard drives and lower-end graphics cards being pretty reasonable nowadays, there is no real incentive to actually buy a new computer for most users.
For example, right now I'm running a computer with an Abit AB-BM6 motherboard with 320 MB PC-100 SDRAM, 500 MHz Celeron A CPU, 8 GB hard drive, Matrox G400 DualHead AGP graphics card, a no-name PCI sound card with the Yamaha XS-DG sound chipset, and a Zoom Telephonics 2949L external V.90 modem. That's far more than enough to run Windows 98 easily, surf the Internet and run Works 2000 productivity software.
If I were to upgrade my system so I can run games, I can easily get a 40-60 GB ATA-100 hard drive, swap out the Matrox card for an ATI Radeon 7500 AGP card, and upgrade the CPU to a Celeron 850 MHz Coppermine CPU using a special Socket 370 adapter from Powerleap.
I think people will be surprised that a memory upgrade plus hard drive upgrade will speed up the system 50-75% pretty easily.
Just as a note, I've had some very good and very bad experiences with White Box systems, although I'd never buy a pre-fab machine despite the bad. The ability to pick what goes in is more than worth it. However, it's all about where you get it from.
Personally, the biggest mistake I ever made was to buy a custom box from CompuSmart (for all of you Canadians out there). They originally were good on price but the system was a nightmare. The power supply was wrong for my Thunderbird 800, and consequently burned out the motherboard and processor. Of course, this was only on the fifth trip into the shop that they discovered this. Unfortunately, all my parts were on warranty there. They kept telling me it was either the RAM had slipped out or that it was somehow my fault that the system wouldn't boot. Then, they took an agonizing four weeks to get a replacement motherboard (and wrote nasty messages into their in-store computer system about me when I kept coming in and checking up on it (yeah, I saw those messages, Jerks)). Finally, once the four weeks were up, I took it home and couldn't get the network card to work, combined with the machine sporadically restarting and giving me registry errors. Another trip to tech support and they diagnosed that the processor was screwed (way to check that out the first time, guys). Another SEVEN WEEKS later, I got my new processor. Luckily I got a replacement/loaner or I would have snapped. Then they tried to tell me that it was my fault that the network card didn't work, despite the fact that it had been sitting on THEIR DESK for the four weeks that the motherboard was out they were the only ones who touched it during that time. Only a fresh reformat fixed the problem.
At this point, I swore never to buy from them again. When the SAME PROBLEM came back two months later, I took it to another local small-time business who diagnosed it correctly and fixed the power supply in three days. I will definitely be buying my next system from them (PC-Place (the small-time shop in Saskatoon, Sk)).
So as a lesson, white box is the way to go, make sure you know who's building your computer, and NEVER BUY FROM COMPUSMART!
- Relativistic? That's barely Newtonian!