Is it better and/or cheaper to just buy a fully built name brand PC in a store or online?
In my opinion, building your own PC has more merits and benefits than buying a pre-built PC. The biggest one is the experience of building a PC, which is fun and note-worthy. Websites like Dell and HP allow you to customize their already prebuilt PCs for good prices (from what I’ve noticed). Aside from that, prebuilt PCs are only expensive if you’re going to those expensive brands, one of which is under Dell: Alienware. Of course, that’s going down the line of top-of-the-line performance.
Long story short, it depends where you go and what you want. Whatever you decide, take about an hour of your time to compare prices for your preference(s). Below are a few popular places.
Websites where you can build/customize PCs to your own preference all online include:
- Dell
- HP
- Cyber Power
Websites to buy parts and build yourself include:
- Newegg
- Micro Center (also in-store)
- Tigerdirect
- OutletPC
• While it can sometimes be cheaper to buy a name brand PC, not only do they have a huge markup but they also up sell so many products (especially online) you can easily end up spending over $200 in software you can mostly get for free as open source, $150 or more just on their customer service that you may or may not even use especially if you know someone that works on computers and if you order online, add on another $60-70 or more for S&H. (I’ve built a lot of computers by ordering parts online and I’ve never spent over $40 for S&H) • Some companies use low quality hardware to save money which can cause it to fail long before it should. For example, one of the computer companies I used to work for would, depending on case design, place the hard drive directly underneath the power supply less than 1/4 of an inch away from each other. You should never have your PSU that close to your hard drive! • Some PC companies filter out customer reviews on their pages so that most of the bad ra
