Build My Own or Buy a Dell?

Build your own:

1. much better parts/quality parts (instead of usually the cheapest used by Dell)
2. way more options
3. much better upgrade-ability (Dells use custom BTX cases and are hard to upgrade)
4. saves you money in the end

for the price of that dell you could build a much better machine than that if 1200 dollars is your budget then you should be able to build a nice core i5 based machine with the 5770, that will give you the best all all around performance and will last you for at least two or three years before you will need to change any parts and it will have better upgreadabilty

build your own
dell is overpriced

Asking whether to buy or build on a computer enthusiast website and forum is like asking if women are available at a brothel.

Well...

You posted a Build / Buy question in an enthusiast forum, so all responses have been "BUILD".

My recommedation is to "BUILD" as well, but you need to realize the following:

1. You are your own tech support. Of course you can alway post technical question here @ THG.

2. You are responsible for mailing out all warranty cards and dealing with the brand names should something fail within the warranty period.

3. You should feel comfortable and be patient enough to put something together by yourself. Again, you can always post questions here...

the question is, has he ever built a machine before,

then i would choose neither and go for a company who builds pcs..

the main disadvantage of dell is they have hardly any upgrade scope.

I personally would built my own and certainly aim higher on the spec list that you have...

thats my opinion but the rest is up to you.

For the cost of that Dell machine you should be able to build your own i5 750 or Phenom II 955 machine, paired with at least an HD 5770.

nah I can still return the computer from dell which is what I've decided to do for sure, I've never built one myself but I'm an electrician so I'm no stranger to wires and and troubleshooting, I'm now deciding whether it's worth it to go with the AMD Phenom II X4 955 or stick with a Athlon X4 620 considering my uses are somewhat light, but I'll be posting yet another thread to do with that =/

What is a 550 watt " Goldenfield " ?

Like everyone else I would build my own, I do know how it feels to not be very familiar building my own system but I recently learned how to do everything 100% and my knowledge with computers has gone up a lot, i'm really glad I built my system, it feels like an accomplishment and I didn't need to spend a lot of money, my last system was a dell and I regretted having purchased it. Just stick to these forums and order the parts from newegg, i'd go with a high end cpu if you are willing to spent over 1,000$ it would be smart to do so, that way you will be set for the next few years, and even in a few years it will be considered a decent system.

I'm thinking of a new build soon and can't or haven't decided which CPU to go with yet. I was leaning towards an Intel C2D quad core, but don't really understand or know the difference between the C2D quads, the i5 or the i7's. Then there's the AMD quad's also and I was researching or thinking about an AMD Phenom II X4 955 as a possibility too.

I'm not a gamer, but I trade stocks and currencies online. I currently have 2 monitors and will have 2 more soon for a total of 4. Financial trading is mostly all 2D charts and moving charts and feeds. One monitor will play a live TV feed of financial info. You have to be fast when trading currency, the market changes so quickly. I have a graphics card that will play 4 monitors from one slot, the PNY Quadro NVS 440.

The i7's still seem a little pricey, but are they the most future proof right now? What are the i5's? Can any of the AMD's compete with them or will they be obsolete soon?

I'm currently running XP Pro but will probably upgrade to Win 7 64 bit.

I'd appreciate everyone's thoughts or opinions on which direction to go with this.

Anybody know why the price of RAM seems to have gone up lately. Any chances of it coming down soon?

Thanks all.

Number 3 is not true anymore. Since 2008 at least (whenever Dell started referring to their desktop line as Inspiron), Dell has gone back to traditional ATX case design. The Dell XPS systems stayed BTX for another year after that I think, but now, all the systems are back to ATX.

I too have wondered why ram is going up in price.

Less than a year ago I bought 4gb of ddr2 1066. After the mail in rebate the price was about $40. Today, I think I would have to pay much closer to $100 for the same thing.

I don't believe that in a recession, there has been such a change in supply and demand that the price of ram nearly doubled in less than a year.

My guess is that this has to do with deficit spending and the balance of trade. Deficit spending requires the government to issue bonds, bought abroad, lowering the value of the dollar overseas. That means we pay more dollars for ram imported form over seas.

I would be delighted for an economist out there to tell us what the real answer is.

By the way, I believe we are also seeing upward creep in the price of mother boards and psu's. Is the start of general inflation?

Come on guys tell me I am wrong. In the mean time I going to fasten my money belt in preparation for a bumpy ride.

I agree i5s and i7s are better for video processing, but if you bought any CPU and it's a "big disappointment", you obviously didn't do your research properly.

I don't think number 4 or possibly 1,2,3 or 4 is true anymore. I have been 'building my own' for the past 15 or so years but lately I've been tempted to buy a built system. I went to the dell website and for $899 get a i7-920 system, 3gb ddr, 500gb drive, dvd writer, nvidia geforce 310 with windows7 home premium. I went to newegg and priced an equivalent system and end up in about the same price range.

In the next couple of weeks I'm going to get a new system and I'm still sitting on the fence

I can't agree more.

The main problem with OEM computers is, most OEM's don't like the end user to make modifications to thier designs, wether it be overclocking to upgrading the CPU or the mobo and even in my case the PSU, and therefore make it VERY difficult to improve the performance of " thier " system due to " propriatary specifications and parameters ". I agree with most of the recomendations here so far, look at the i7 920, Corair has the best PSU in the industry, be wary of Asus mobo's, there have been quality issues creeping up lately as well as with Creative sound cards. The biggest question I have is, if your doing " light gaming " do you really need a $500-$600 graphics card when 2 ATI 4670's in Crossfire would be more than adaquit to meet your needs?? Bottom line, build your own, at the very least, knowing every technical aspect of the rig you build will give you a much better understanding of what your system can and cannot do, as well as better diagnosing ability should something screwy happen.

By the way, for $800 shipped you can put together a nice Quad Core machine (Core i5 750 or AMD Phenom II X4 955). Add another $150-$250 for an LCD monitor. I know, because I just purchased the parts for my build.

My own machine went the AMD route and came out to $750 including Case + Power Supply (Antec Sonata), 4 GB of PC1600 RAM, AMD Quad Core, Radeon HD 5770 graphics, and 1 TB Western Digital HDD. I already had a nice 24" monitor from Christmas.

Check prices on Newegg. Post a potential configuration here on Tom's Hardware and let people help you out. Folks here gave me great advice on my own build.

EDIT: By the way, this same build configured on Dell's website (using a Core i5 650 for performance parity) would have cost me $250 more once tax and shipping were included. $250 is a lot of dough. Plus Dell would only have included only a 1 year warranty at that price, whereas every part in my new build has a 3 year to lifetime warranty.