Hello Panther
Bear in mind that I’m not contradicting you, Panther. You have a valid post and what you say is oh so true. While building a PC these days is as simple as plugging the wires into the back of your VCR, TV, Stereo, etc. to orchestrate them, and the most difficult part is loading software, which we all do anyway, it is definitely NOT for most people [Do you feel lucky today?].
I’m going to take each of your paragraphs and show a “counter-point” for those who may be adventurous and feel inclined to do so.
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote
With the current pricing of PCs, I don't see any reason for anyone to build their own!
It’s fun, can save money, and the feeling of accomplishment is there for those who like to roll their shirtsleeves up.
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote
I've got an MSEE (with honors even), worked in the industry for years, build my own electronic gadgets all the time,
I’ve been building radio transmitters and superhets from schematics since I was fourteen, designed, built and tested a lot of electronics before the world ever knew it existed at Lincoln Lab in my younger day so we have similar backgrounds. I aced FORTRAN in college with a 4.0 without even studying, otherwise we deviate in the honors region; I just wanted to get it over with.
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote
and have a close friend who (last year) went through building his own just for the heck of it. He already had a system and only needed to purchase things like the motherboard... but there are so many neat new things on the market. In the end, he had a very nice system with many bells & whistles and had saved himself a whopping $200 over the cost of the system built to his specs by some place like PC connection or Circuit City! $200 dollars AND since he built it himself there is no warranty.
He screwed up without a warranty on parts…
Personal, Me: Last PC I built, check the prices, not the cheapest, either:
1.1G AMD=$408 //Fastest thing on the market
ABIT KT7 Raid=$180 //built for the future
Premium case=$66 //Not the one I bought
PC133 SDIMM=$96 // fast memory
These all are the MOST PREMIUM fail-free parts you can get.
Total about $750 for the fastest thing going.
I cannibalized the rest of what I needed from what I replaced.
To have to purchase decent [good, but not the largest] hard drive, video, sound card, and modem [they’re cheap] and were talking about one thousand, plus or minus small change. I know everything about what I have and know it is top equipment.
Compared to a similar commercial unit which uses proprietary everything for $2,200+, and becomes a throw-away computer after a few short years. I’ve seen some of these thin commercial motherboards that look like logarithmic bacon when they overheat once or twice. What you have and what you can do with it is anybody’s guest.
Let’s take an “average” speedy user home-grown system. Gut feel says divide the $750 price by two and add the same $250 to it
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote
Right now, for ~$1200, you can get an 800 MHz P-III machine with gobs of RAM, loads of harddrive space, a DVD or CD-RW, a decent sound-card, EVEN a monitor and printer! And that's not even the top-o-the-line anymore! If you want something cheaper, you can get a machine just like that, but with a 500MHz "Celeron" for ~$800. If you're willing to spend ~$2k, you can get the 1.1Ghz processor (either P-III or Athlon) machine that has both the DVD and the CD-RW!
A few years ago you could get a bargain basement PC for $500 before they came out with ISP discounts which are another rip-off. You can even get an e-machine for something like $99.
Missing from the above are several things most important to me: reliability, reusability, upgrade-ability. To me, 1.1GHz commercial stuff can be slow. That 1.1 number doesn’t mean fast unless everything else is playing in harmony. Celerons? Not my idea of a CPU, rather a crippled processor. “I want a Pentium!” Athlons are much faster Hz vs Hz. You have to watch the cache sizes or any CPU can be a dog. Are you going to get PC133 memory with your 1Gig Pentium? I doubt it and I watch all the ads in the Sunday papers. Pentium bus speed vs Athlon bus speed? We’re talking proprietary motherboard and you could get stuck with a 66Mhz bus. To me, you get what you pay for, and you go cheap, you get cheap, and you can get screwed. Ignorance is bliss. Are ads in the papers going to tell you what you need to know to make an intelligent decision on a PC? No! They are going to bait you with numbers so they can sell to the sheep and watch them all walk over the cliff.
ON THE PLUS SIDE for store-bought PCs… Maybe a year or so ago, I selected a PC for my favorite cousin at Comp USA. I selected the exact one for his needs and future needs for a cost-effective price. It took a month of scanning the Sunday paper ads, all of them, reading each and every single word and digesting it before I compared it with something similar on another ad. It’s a real jungle out there, and the average person can’t tell the difference between a pussycat and a tiger. The salesman is going to direct the potential buyer to the PC most advantageous to sell, or maybe doesn’t even know himself.
For Mail order PCs, I’ll go with DELL or Gateway. Those two PCs are used industry-wide, are reputable, and you can build your own right on the internet. However, you still cannot choose what KINDS of peripheral equipment or WHO MAKES IT to go into your PC, and for the same PC specs manufactured a week later the innards could be completely different; both mail and store-bought PCs.
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote
And here's the best part... Those all come with a full warranty! If you want it for a business use, pay a little extra and get the "in-house" warranty where if it breaks, you just pick up the phone and dial 1-800-PCbroke and they come and either fix it or replace it.
Yeah, right! Two things here. 1) I’ve had my experiences with receiving broken PCs and also warranties. It’s not always cut and dried, and you can get burnt there.
2) All my stuff has a warranty – and I’ve flexed my warranty muscles with good luck. Most failures are infant mortality. Either it works or it will fail sooner than later. You don’t need to spend $300 for a warranty for a computer. That’s absolute onsense. What happened to the days when they came with decent warranties all on their own?
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote
Don't get me wrong... If you want to build your own "for $hits & giggles", by all means have a blast... but if you want to have some technical help, a warranty, and some "insurance", then for what you'll save, it's just not worth it to build your own.
You and I differ big time on this, Panther, a very subjective paragraph. This is not a flame post, therefore no road rage here. What one man's poison ....
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote
The days where a half-decent PC costs $3500+ are long gone.
Damn right! Been gone for a long time. Forget about the nostalgia until an appropriate post heading comes up.
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote
BTW, MNSHO, stay away from the Rambus technology stuff... it's going nowhere fast. The double-data-rate RAMs are cheaper and actually operate faster than the Rambus. Even Intel has admitted what those of us in the industry knew already... that the Rambus technology can't keep up with the higher data-rate demands.
Keep away from that Rambus stuff. To me, the Rambus is like a fart in a scuba tank.
I just built a PC for one of my students for ½ what it would cost him at Comp USA, and he knows every single part inside [So do I
]. There is a certain confidence and good feeling some of us have to know what kinds of peripherals we have, and have complete control over the destiny of our PC [kind of we own it instead of it owning our soul].
For the two people mentioned above it was a different solution tailored to the individual.
Building a PC today is so easy. A spintite, phillips, long-nose pliers, and common sense are pretty much the toolset required because all you have to do is plug a few cables in, turn a few screws, set the BIOS [almost all you have to do is set the hard disk senser to autopiolot and you are done], load the OS [Many have already loaded a windows flavor or a UNIX variant], and the rest is load whatever software you have kicking around on CD.
