5 ms·

Hearing stuff like this really makes me want to build a PC, but I just know that as soon as I do, I'm gonna be Moore's Law'd so hard. I simply can't justify it

Hearing stuff like this really makes me want to build a PC, but I just know that as soon as I do, I'm gonna be Moore's Law'd so hard. I simply can't justify it given how much money is involved.

snazz 8y ago
It probably never makes sense to build a computer. It’s normally more expensive and if something stops working, it can be hard to isolate the part at fault and RMA it. Buying a prebuilt PC with parts you know are compatible with your OS generally gives you a warranty so that you can simply bring it back instead of wasting more time and money fixing the issue yourself. <edit> I’m surprised to learn how differing others’ experiences are, especially on the price of the overall system. When I bought my most recent desktop, I typed in the make and model of every part into PCPartPicker and learned that I would be saving over $100 by going pre-built. There were some fair points made down thread about the PSU and mobo, which I hadn’t really considered. My RMA experiences with a few hard drives versus the exchange process at my local Micro Center (they swapped the whole thing out even though I was well past the return period) were night and day, and many of you must have had the opposite experience to take the stance that you did. Regardless, I find it interesting how polarizing this issue is and I probably shouldn’t have written my original comment in such a provocative way (although it didn’t seem that way at the time). </edit>
- TheCapn 8y ago
  Wut? Maybe for general purpose computers doing nothing special but its generally more cost effective to select and build your own PC for things like gaming. Beyond that, computers are pretty robust. Its pretty hard to select parts that are incompatible assuming you get a CPU that fits the socket on the motherboard you buy and you don't go cheap on your PSU. Lots of tools (and communities) exist to make sure you're selecting parts properly (not overdoing it on the CPU when you're getting a low tier GPU for instance). I'm not sure what your OS comment implies because virtually everything will work on most widely adopted OSes (and if you're running a pretty obscure linux distro I'd assume you're familiar with driver woes). I'm more than happy to be corrected, but if you're buying prebuilt you're likely paying for the parts and the labour involved. Unless the company is getting steep discounts on volume purchases (which they are only getting for bottom tier parts) you're not saving money by having them put it together for you.
  - sixothree 8y ago
    My experience suggests otherwise. System Integrators use the same parts I like but often get them for a discount. I build my own systems because I like the constant incremental upgrade model. But when I recently had to help someone purchase a system I found it was hard to beat si prices with equally spaced hardware.
    - zargon 8y ago
      Could you name some of these companies with prices competitive with building yourself? I'm in the market for a new PC when Zen 2 comes out. I would prefer to buy the computer instead of assemble it myself, but I've never found the prices to be competitive.
      - lightedman 8y ago
        Go look at portatech.
      - sixothree 8y ago
        I worked with a friend who purchased from iBuyPower (shudder). But the experience turned out fairly well. But Corsair, Falcon NW, and CyberPower are others.
    - smittywerben 8y ago
      I recently dismantled 3 generations of pre-built PC's to remove the hard drives. One computer needed a 90-degree angled Phillips head to release the removable tray... ended up using a hammer to smack it out... I built my current computer and don't need a screwdriver to open the case, or to replace the SSD, HDDs, GPU, or RAM. They all just pop out now! First computer I've upgraded too.
- secabeen 8y ago
  That's true, if you have a complete failure. If you have a partial failure, self-build can be better, because you can pull the failed part and run with a degraded system while the RMA processes, then install the RMA. With pre-build, you're sending the whole system back and are without a computer for 5-10 days.
- j-c-hewitt 8y ago
  This is not really true. On both of the computers I built recently, every component was warrantied and in some instances I have even warranty-returned a product of theirs in the past which was one of the reasons why I selected parts from those manufacturers over others. If you know how to troubleshoot effectively, many issues are not that hard to isolate. There are some that are very time consuming to isolate but those issues tend to be pretty rare (troubleshooting memory etc.). The nice thing about building a computer is just to be able to configure it exactly to what you want. In some cases some retailers do screwy things and/or send customers the wrong parts although there are some top flight retailers who don't do that and charge a premium for it. It's not necessarily more price competitive for some things but there are certain key components that retail PC companies tend to cheap out on unnecessarily like the PSU and the motherboard. Cheaping out on the PSU can give the retailer a lot of extra margin but a good PSU is so cheap that it does not make that much of a difference in final price to the user. If you learn a bit more about things like case airflow or are planning to overclock a lot of things that retail PC sellers do will drive you nuts so once you are at a certain knowledge level it is just better to build your own despite all the many petty aggravations and frustrations that can occur with it. All the annoyances tend to be temporary whereas the benefits last for years.
- NikolaNovak 8y ago
  It seems experiences vary wildly, and I'd assume that's based on differing criteria. For a general purpose / MS Office / browsing desktop, going pre-built may be viable. For any more specific / demanding usage, building a computer yourself will allow you to get the performance you need for the price you want. I'm decade or more past the point of enjoying building a new PC, but a pre-built machine never seemed to make financial or use-case sense for me. YMMV :)
- lightedman 8y ago
  Normally more expensive? I can build a high end gaming rig for the same damn cost as a gaming console, and have 4x the horsepower.
- magicalhippo 8y ago
  When you build your own PC, you can decide which parts to spend more money on, and on which to skimp. With pre-built you often have little choice, or the choices are very limited or very expensive. Typical example is memory, where the pre-built usually come with very little memory, and increasing memory costs much more compared to the retail prices of memory modules.
Globz 8y ago
It is not as bad as it used to be, if you want to build a gaming PC today it will most likely last from 5 to 6 years without needing any upgrades, most upgrades are barely noticeable if you already use a decent graphic card and NVMe SSD. If you have no desire to use it as a gaming rig but simply want a beast for compiling your code/video editing then it should last even longer.
Baeocystin 8y ago
We're well past those days, (un)fortunately. My 2015-built i4790k/1080/SSD that I use at home feels exactly the same as the more modern desktops I use at work. Even the SSD, which sees heavy use, has burned through less than 10% of its expected lifecycle. The only thing I've had to replace are the case fan and the CPU fan, just from age/use, but looking at the horizon, I see no reason I couldn't use the machine itself for another 4 years without issue.
- YourMatt 8y ago
  I'm still using one I built in 2009. CPU, motherboard, and PSU are really the only original components anymore, so maybe it's not a great comparison, but it's still a great machine that can do heavier lifting than my maxed out Surface Book. There are some bottlenecks that's going to force me to rebuild soon though. I love how we can now get a decade from one build with minor upgrades every few years.
- copperx 8y ago
  Computers used to become twice as fast every 18 months. Now it takes about 7 years.
- dragontamer 8y ago
  You've got a bit of an edge case... Haswell is the last machine I'd consider modern. Go back one generation and Ivy Bridge is missing AVX2 and loses performance in a number of applications. Haswell is the oldest CPU that supports AVX2, DDR4, quad-core standard, probably has USB3.0 slots and PCIe 3.0. "Modern" machines like Skylake have increased to 6-core standard (even for an i5) or more (i7 and AMD Zen are 8-cores now). Those extra cores help with compiles / 3d blender renders / some other tasks, but its not a major improvement otherwise. USB 3.1 Type C isn't a big change from USB 3.0, and PCIe 3.0 and DDR4 are still mainstream. In as little as a year however, things seem to be changing. Intel Icelake will be adding AVX512 to the mainstream later this year. We'll see whether or not consumers get an uptick in AVX512 usage, or if Adobe / other programs continue to push GPGPU instead. With DDR5 being released in 2019 (with doubled bandwidth compared to DDR4) and PCIe 4.0 beginning adoption, and with PCIe 5.0 and USB4 standards being released, it seems like a major upgrade cycle will occur in the 2020 to 2021 timeframe. (It seems like the Desktop market is skipping PCIe 4.0 and just going straight to PCIe 5.0, quadrupling I/O bandwidth in one jump) --------- Laptops are still waiting for LPDDR4 support. Kinda sucks for them. Intel really feels like they stalled out with all of these 10nm issues they've been having. A lot of their technology (ie: Ice Lake) was delayed due to the 10nm issues.
theandrewbailey 8y ago
New CPUs aren't much faster than the old ones. Going from an i7-6700k to 7700k to 8700k to 9700k gets maybe 10% faster single threaded performance on each step. GPUs are starting to show a similar story. Those Geforce RTX cards barely faster on a dollar-per-dollar basis than their predecessors. Unless you need the transfer speeds, those hot new NVME SSDs aren't noticeably faster than SATA SSDs. I would building a PC right now, but the one I built two years ago is fine.
- pitaj 8y ago
  > Going from an i7-6700k to 7700k to 8700k to 9700k gets maybe 10% faster single threaded performance on each step Sure, but you can get CPUs with 2-4x the number of cores at consumer price points, which is great for people who do streaming or virtualization. > hot new NVME SSDs aren't noticeably faster than SATA SSDs Oh yes they are, and I'd never go back
  - pmoriarty 8y ago
    "Sure, but you can get CPUs with 2-4x the number of cores at consumer price points, which is great for people who do streaming or virtualization." They're also great for people like me who use distros like Gentoo where we're regularly recompiling all the software we use as new versions become available. My entire recompile cycle now takes literally weeks of non-stop compilation, on my old, slow 2-core laptop. Compiling qtwebkit alone takes several days. If I had 8 or 16 cores on a modern processor, that would be a massive improvement.
copperx 8y ago
If you have a case, you can build a more than adequate PC for development work for less than $300. That's assuming 16 gigs of RAM and a Ryzen APU.
- meroje 8y ago
  No way, you're only getting the ram at that price point.
  - rootusrootus 8y ago
    It's not quite that expensive. I paid less than $200 a few weeks ago for 32GB of SODIMM to go in a NUC. I think $300 for all the guts of a machine is probably pretty optimistic, but the RAM would only be about a third of it.
  - crysin 8y ago
    https://pcpartpicker.com/list/DzBtfH https://pcpartpicker.com/list/DzBtfH
    - a_f 8y ago
      The 2200G comes with the Wraith cooler, which I believe is actually pretty good for a stock cooler. So you should be able to get away without the Coolmaster, saving some additional cash :) [Unless your prices are CPU only] Edit: You would probably need to put the savings into a PSU though!

Hearing stuff like this really makes me want to build a PC, but I just know that as soon as I do, I'm gonna be Moore's Law'd so hard. I simply can't justify it given how much money is involved.

snazz 8y ago

It probably never makes sense to build a computer. It’s normally more expensive and if something stops working, it can be hard to isolate the part at fault and RMA it. Buying a prebuilt PC with parts you know are compatible with your OS generally gives you a warranty so that you can simply bring it back instead of wasting more time and money fixing the issue yourself. <edit> I’m surprised to learn how differing others’ experiences are, especially on the price of the overall system. When I bought my most recent desktop, I typed in the make and model of every part into PCPartPicker and learned that I would be saving over $100 by going pre-built. There were some fair points made down thread about the PSU and mobo, which I hadn’t really considered. My RMA experiences with a few hard drives versus the exchange process at my local Micro Center (they swapped the whole thing out even though I was well past the return period) were night and day, and many of you must have had the opposite experience to take the stance that you did. Regardless, I find it interesting how polarizing this issue is and I probably shouldn’t have written my original comment in such a provocative way (although it didn’t seem that way at the time). </edit>

TheCapn 8y ago
Wut? Maybe for general purpose computers doing nothing special but its generally more cost effective to select and build your own PC for things like gaming. Beyond that, computers are pretty robust. Its pretty hard to select parts that are incompatible assuming you get a CPU that fits the socket on the motherboard you buy and you don't go cheap on your PSU. Lots of tools (and communities) exist to make sure you're selecting parts properly (not overdoing it on the CPU when you're getting a low tier GPU for instance). I'm not sure what your OS comment implies because virtually everything will work on most widely adopted OSes (and if you're running a pretty obscure linux distro I'd assume you're familiar with driver woes). I'm more than happy to be corrected, but if you're buying prebuilt you're likely paying for the parts and the labour involved. Unless the company is getting steep discounts on volume purchases (which they are only getting for bottom tier parts) you're not saving money by having them put it together for you.
- sixothree 8y ago
  My experience suggests otherwise. System Integrators use the same parts I like but often get them for a discount. I build my own systems because I like the constant incremental upgrade model. But when I recently had to help someone purchase a system I found it was hard to beat si prices with equally spaced hardware.
  - zargon 8y ago
    Could you name some of these companies with prices competitive with building yourself? I'm in the market for a new PC when Zen 2 comes out. I would prefer to buy the computer instead of assemble it myself, but I've never found the prices to be competitive.
    - lightedman 8y ago
      Go look at portatech.
    - sixothree 8y ago
      I worked with a friend who purchased from iBuyPower (shudder). But the experience turned out fairly well. But Corsair, Falcon NW, and CyberPower are others.
  - smittywerben 8y ago
    I recently dismantled 3 generations of pre-built PC's to remove the hard drives. One computer needed a 90-degree angled Phillips head to release the removable tray... ended up using a hammer to smack it out... I built my current computer and don't need a screwdriver to open the case, or to replace the SSD, HDDs, GPU, or RAM. They all just pop out now! First computer I've upgraded too.
secabeen 8y ago
That's true, if you have a complete failure. If you have a partial failure, self-build can be better, because you can pull the failed part and run with a degraded system while the RMA processes, then install the RMA. With pre-build, you're sending the whole system back and are without a computer for 5-10 days.
j-c-hewitt 8y ago
This is not really true. On both of the computers I built recently, every component was warrantied and in some instances I have even warranty-returned a product of theirs in the past which was one of the reasons why I selected parts from those manufacturers over others. If you know how to troubleshoot effectively, many issues are not that hard to isolate. There are some that are very time consuming to isolate but those issues tend to be pretty rare (troubleshooting memory etc.). The nice thing about building a computer is just to be able to configure it exactly to what you want. In some cases some retailers do screwy things and/or send customers the wrong parts although there are some top flight retailers who don't do that and charge a premium for it. It's not necessarily more price competitive for some things but there are certain key components that retail PC companies tend to cheap out on unnecessarily like the PSU and the motherboard. Cheaping out on the PSU can give the retailer a lot of extra margin but a good PSU is so cheap that it does not make that much of a difference in final price to the user. If you learn a bit more about things like case airflow or are planning to overclock a lot of things that retail PC sellers do will drive you nuts so once you are at a certain knowledge level it is just better to build your own despite all the many petty aggravations and frustrations that can occur with it. All the annoyances tend to be temporary whereas the benefits last for years.
NikolaNovak 8y ago
It seems experiences vary wildly, and I'd assume that's based on differing criteria. For a general purpose / MS Office / browsing desktop, going pre-built may be viable. For any more specific / demanding usage, building a computer yourself will allow you to get the performance you need for the price you want. I'm decade or more past the point of enjoying building a new PC, but a pre-built machine never seemed to make financial or use-case sense for me. YMMV :)
lightedman 8y ago
Normally more expensive? I can build a high end gaming rig for the same damn cost as a gaming console, and have 4x the horsepower.
magicalhippo 8y ago
When you build your own PC, you can decide which parts to spend more money on, and on which to skimp. With pre-built you often have little choice, or the choices are very limited or very expensive. Typical example is memory, where the pre-built usually come with very little memory, and increasing memory costs much more compared to the retail prices of memory modules.

Globz 8y ago

It is not as bad as it used to be, if you want to build a gaming PC today it will most likely last from 5 to 6 years without needing any upgrades, most upgrades are barely noticeable if you already use a decent graphic card and NVMe SSD. If you have no desire to use it as a gaming rig but simply want a beast for compiling your code/video editing then it should last even longer.

Baeocystin 8y ago

We're well past those days, (un)fortunately. My 2015-built i4790k/1080/SSD that I use at home feels exactly the same as the more modern desktops I use at work. Even the SSD, which sees heavy use, has burned through less than 10% of its expected lifecycle. The only thing I've had to replace are the case fan and the CPU fan, just from age/use, but looking at the horizon, I see no reason I couldn't use the machine itself for another 4 years without issue.

YourMatt 8y ago
I'm still using one I built in 2009. CPU, motherboard, and PSU are really the only original components anymore, so maybe it's not a great comparison, but it's still a great machine that can do heavier lifting than my maxed out Surface Book. There are some bottlenecks that's going to force me to rebuild soon though. I love how we can now get a decade from one build with minor upgrades every few years.
copperx 8y ago
Computers used to become twice as fast every 18 months. Now it takes about 7 years.
dragontamer 8y ago
You've got a bit of an edge case... Haswell is the last machine I'd consider modern. Go back one generation and Ivy Bridge is missing AVX2 and loses performance in a number of applications. Haswell is the oldest CPU that supports AVX2, DDR4, quad-core standard, probably has USB3.0 slots and PCIe 3.0. "Modern" machines like Skylake have increased to 6-core standard (even for an i5) or more (i7 and AMD Zen are 8-cores now). Those extra cores help with compiles / 3d blender renders / some other tasks, but its not a major improvement otherwise. USB 3.1 Type C isn't a big change from USB 3.0, and PCIe 3.0 and DDR4 are still mainstream. In as little as a year however, things seem to be changing. Intel Icelake will be adding AVX512 to the mainstream later this year. We'll see whether or not consumers get an uptick in AVX512 usage, or if Adobe / other programs continue to push GPGPU instead. With DDR5 being released in 2019 (with doubled bandwidth compared to DDR4) and PCIe 4.0 beginning adoption, and with PCIe 5.0 and USB4 standards being released, it seems like a major upgrade cycle will occur in the 2020 to 2021 timeframe. (It seems like the Desktop market is skipping PCIe 4.0 and just going straight to PCIe 5.0, quadrupling I/O bandwidth in one jump) --------- Laptops are still waiting for LPDDR4 support. Kinda sucks for them. Intel really feels like they stalled out with all of these 10nm issues they've been having. A lot of their technology (ie: Ice Lake) was delayed due to the 10nm issues.

theandrewbailey 8y ago

New CPUs aren't much faster than the old ones. Going from an i7-6700k to 7700k to 8700k to 9700k gets maybe 10% faster single threaded performance on each step. GPUs are starting to show a similar story. Those Geforce RTX cards barely faster on a dollar-per-dollar basis than their predecessors. Unless you need the transfer speeds, those hot new NVME SSDs aren't noticeably faster than SATA SSDs. I would building a PC right now, but the one I built two years ago is fine.

pitaj 8y ago
> Going from an i7-6700k to 7700k to 8700k to 9700k gets maybe 10% faster single threaded performance on each step Sure, but you can get CPUs with 2-4x the number of cores at consumer price points, which is great for people who do streaming or virtualization. > hot new NVME SSDs aren't noticeably faster than SATA SSDs Oh yes they are, and I'd never go back
- pmoriarty 8y ago
  "Sure, but you can get CPUs with 2-4x the number of cores at consumer price points, which is great for people who do streaming or virtualization." They're also great for people like me who use distros like Gentoo where we're regularly recompiling all the software we use as new versions become available. My entire recompile cycle now takes literally weeks of non-stop compilation, on my old, slow 2-core laptop. Compiling qtwebkit alone takes several days. If I had 8 or 16 cores on a modern processor, that would be a massive improvement.

copperx 8y ago

If you have a case, you can build a more than adequate PC for development work for less than $300. That's assuming 16 gigs of RAM and a Ryzen APU.

meroje 8y ago
No way, you're only getting the ram at that price point.
- rootusrootus 8y ago
  It's not quite that expensive. I paid less than $200 a few weeks ago for 32GB of SODIMM to go in a NUC. I think $300 for all the guts of a machine is probably pretty optimistic, but the RAM would only be about a third of it.
- crysin 8y ago
  https://pcpartpicker.com/list/DzBtfH https://pcpartpicker.com/list/DzBtfH
  - a_f 8y ago
    The 2200G comes with the Wraith cooler, which I believe is actually pretty good for a stock cooler. So you should be able to get away without the Coolmaster, saving some additional cash :) [Unless your prices are CPU only] Edit: You would probably need to put the savings into a PSU though!