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Wrao
Yarp
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Road Warrior
 
2014-11-09, 21:55

Quote:
Originally Posted by alcimedes View Post
See, at that point they've got it priced properly. I'd likely pay $150 premium to have the machine built. My problem with pre-built machine has always been that they'd cheap out on at least one critical component, which would hobble the entire setup.

If they've also stopped doing that, I could see a gaming PC in my future.

(I've been messing around with Steamplay with my tower booted into PC mode and my laptop still in Mac mode. The playing experience so far has been surprisingly solid.)

But it would allow me to dump the tower some where out of sight/mind/hearing, and play PC games on my laptop.
Really they likely 'cheap out' on more than just one component but so do DIY builders too? I mean, obviously you can choose whatever you want to put in there but a sentence the DIY seems to love is "This one is basically just as good but $X cheaper than that one" and so much of the entire point of DIY is to go cheap overall and I think a lot of times builders cheap out just the same, though because they rationalize how and where they cheap out they don't think of it as cheapening out and instead think of it as just being savvier. Because that's kind of the punchline to the entire thing anyway, you can spend $700-1000 to get a great DIY PC or you can spend $1000-$1300 to get virtually the exact same machine but with 'high quality' components.

But yeah, with pre-built stuff you certainly can't know for sure what they put in there or where they might have chosen to cut corners unless you really go the extra mile to look up every component and compare it with what's available OEM and whatever.

But then on top of all of that, component manufacturers aren't always open and honest either about what they are selling. AMD and Nvidia are notoriously guilty of rebadging old silicon under new names to where something might be 7 series or 8 series or whatever in name but perform worse than certain 6 series chips, not to mention more direct manipulation of numbers and naming where maybe they'll issue a 7955 card for Dell and only Dell to use while the mainstream market gets 7960 and they are virtually identical but not really. Kind of makes you wonder if that stuff is going on with GPUs is it not also going on with RAM or Hard Drives or even PSUs and Mobos? But once you get into that point the DIY equation starts to get so much more involved that for many you might as well have just bought that pre-built PC, taken the warranty it comes with and not worried about it.
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