Should you build your own computer? Why?

[Geek-9pm]

It is more than  just finding good hardware. You must have a good motive to do it yourself.

Many, many years ago, before personal computer became a household word, I built one of the earliest personal computers from a kit that came from a company in New Mexico.

The reasons I had been were valid reasons. But things have changed. That was a long time ago and technology has moved ahead at an incredible pace and now the options available for personal computer owners are much, much greater than they were back in those early days.

At this time I am not telling people that they should go out and buy their own parts and put it together. But that's me. For a more complete coverage of this subject there are some very good sites you can go to. Here is one that I think is the very best coverage of the pros and cons of building your own PC right now at this time.

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/still-cheaper-build-pc/
The article explains there is more than saving money. Your own PC is a way of improving g your own  skills. Or proving you are a total idiot. 

[DaveLembke]

Only ones I ever built were from mixing parts from dead computers back in the day when computers were thousands of dollars in the 1980s and early 1990s taking say 6 dead computers with different problems and figuring out what their problems were and putting together a pile of good parts. It wasnt until 2000 when i actually bought all new parts and built a new one. This was because I needed something better and I couldnt get my college professor to agree to my project or a computer build being a frankenstein, he required of me to research and buy parts and write up why each part was bought and describe my build. That computer cost me $500 to build and wasnt top of the line but was better than what I had at the time so I built a Celeron 733Mhz with Windows Me on a 20GB HDD with 128MB RAM. Saved money buying a computer case with power supply. First power up the computer locked up on me. I shut it off. I turned it back on and POP and a white cloud of smoke filled the room that smelled like rotten fish. The no name power supply that came with the case blew a capacitor. Contacted the company and got a replacement power supply and this replacement didnt have any problems. Wife really loved the room smelling like rotten fish from electrolyte for a week. Since then I didnt start building computers until around 2008 when the off the shelf Compaq S6030NX blew its motherboard and I needed a better than Pentium 4 and needed to buy a motherboard for it. At which point prices dropped on lower end builds and I went building all my desktops from then on and only buy laptops offthe shelf these days.

[BC_Programmer]

I've put together 4 computers from components.

Some unmentioned advantages:

Cosmetics are teased apart from performance.

The main thing you'll be "looking at" will be the case. The choices for cases are innumerable and you can put whatever you like inside them (as long as it's the right form factor, of course). If you like flashy LED stuff and see-through sides you can get a case with a window and LED lighting and other weird stuff. If you (like me) prefer something more simple, you can find many more standard and straightforward cases that don't try to be anything special but have excellent build quality. My point is, when building you don't have to consider appearance at the same time you consider performance- eg there is no "I like how this one looks, but this one is faster" consideration. The two are separate and you can choose how to balance them as part of your budget. You do not get that choice with a pre-built and honestly a lot of pre-built manufacturers use kind of ugly designs (which isn't to suggest that all bare cases are beautiful, either)

Another advantage to building it oneself is that you will be familiar with the insides.  Upgrades tend to be easier in general, and most motherboards you can buy bare are more feature complete than prebuilt systems. Often with pre-built motherboards entire features are removed, stubbed out, or otherwise unavailable, and sometimes they will use non-standard connections, and this can leak out to add-on cards that otherwise come with the system.

[patio]

Another advantage to building it oneself is that you will be familiar with the insides.  Upgrades tend to be easier in general, and most motherboards you can buy bare are more feature complete than prebuilt systems. Often with pre-built motherboards entire features are removed, stubbed out, or otherwise unavailable, and sometimes they will use non-standard connections, and this can leak out to add-on cards that otherwise come with the system.

Great point...i've worked on enuff eMachines to know the user would never even know or find out what MBoard they have as the had a tendency for 1 Model # production for example that coulda had any 1 of 4 - 6 MBoards even though the Models were the same.
All pre-builts are guilty of this...however eMachines were the worst of all...

[strollin]

I remember seeing eMachines in the store a few years back with a seal on the case stating that if the seal was broken (meaning you opened the case), the warranty was voided.  I personally wouldn't purchase or recommend a computer like that. 

[DaveLembke]

I've never bought an eMachines but have been given them by people looking to get rid of them.I too have seen that void warranty label if cover opened and found it to be a joke. But what was more of a joke was that the motherboard inside it was lacking the video card slot. The motherboard had the location for the connector on the board, but the connector was never installed when the board was manufactured... Talk about cutting corners on a motherboard build. I cant imagine much money saved in not giving people the ability to add a better video card instead of the INTEL integrated graphics.

Other oddity was a eMachine computer given to me that came with Windows 7 and 750GB HDD running a Pentium E5400 dual-core, and the system was acting oddly and I looked and saw no hard drive activity. Well that would be because some space cadet felt that a HDD LED on a case was not required, so the case only had a Green Power LED, but no way of seeing hard drive activity. How much money was saved in using a case that didnt have a HDD LED.

This case I drilled a hole into the front cover and added a HDD LED from a old universal case and hot glued it at the back of the LED so it would stay in place, and the eMachine motherboard had the pins to connect the HDD LED so I could then watch HDD activity. The system was found to be acting strangely because the hard drive was dying it would work normal and then slow to a crawl and then get past its issues and work ok again and then crawl again when it hit a bad area of disk.

What surprised me with the more recent eMachine donation to me was that it had an ECS brand motherboard. I have only seen ECS boards prior to this for sale online for people looking to cut corners in price and quality. I didnt expect eMachines to buy into ECS boards for their systems. It was a whole new level of low quality when that was found. This ECS board has since died and the eMachine case now has a Biostar board in it with the E5400 dual-core.