It is a sad reflection of 2020 that the Ars Technica system guide is a review of three mainstream prebuilt systems. I looked into the Lenovo, HP, and Dell syst

It is a sad reflection of 2020 that the Ars Technica system guide is a review of three mainstream prebuilt systems. I looked into the Lenovo, HP, and Dell systems, each of which have showed up on deal sites recently with an RTX 3070, 3080, or 3090. Here are some things I found: One review claimed that the HP Omen has some kind of RAM serial number check in the BIOS: even if you buy the exact brand and model of HyperX Fury RAM, it will run slower, unless you buy it from HP. Generally, the HP Omen 25L and 30L were both knocked for loud/inadequate cooling. There are also complaints about difficulty canceling orders after discovering long shipping times that were not adequately disclosed at order time. I didn't research the Alienware Aurora as much as the other two, but I did find some complaints about loud/inadequate cooling. The Lenovo Legion Tower 7i looked really good. Decent design with adequate cooling. Shipping times are reasonable, because they only seem to list configurations that they actually have. If there is a complaint, it's that their configurations are fixed. You can't configure the RAM or storage. I didn't find as much detail on the 5i, but it seems reasonable within its limits (e.g., doesn't seem to be available with RTX 3080). I also looked at prebuilts from CyberPower, iBuyPower, Corsair, Falcon Northwest, Origin, and others. I presume that their build quality is superior and/or less proprietary, which is generally reflected in their price. I gave up on building my own this time around, and bought an MSI Trident X that happened to show up in stock one evening at Adorama. Its 1TB SSD came partitioned strangely (split into two big partitions with a recovery partition in between them), but MSI has a video on YouTube demonstrating how to fix that using Partition Assistant. I've only had it a few days, but I'm impressed that they squeezed a 10700K and RTX 3080 into a box significantly smaller and quieter than my home-built Ivy Bridge with a GTX 1060. I was able to add a 2TB M.2 with no trouble, and there's even room for 2.5" drive or two.