I wouldn’t even look at buying a prebuilt PC even if it was 20% cheaper, I enjoy building my own too much. I think that if I’d been born fifty years ago I’d be modifying my car, but fortunately computers are cheaper, and you can work on them inside in the warm.
They’re no less harmful though, I used to work building PCs on an assembly line (knowledge of what each component was was strictly optional), and I pretty much constantly had at least one cut on my hands that was healing, although the worst was either a knuckle caught in a spinning fan blade (no I can’t be bothered to turn the computer off to fit that part), or getting a pin on the motherboard under one of your fingernails (OUCH!).
tl/dr for me the building is as much part of my hobby as the gaming, but if you don’t enjoy it it’s probably not worth it.
Rob, not sure if you’re reading the comments (unless I missed a reply from you), but throwing in my 2 cents:
I enjoy building PCs. All the PCs in my house and the ones at my in-laws were built by me. I just like putting stuff together - back before things became too complicated, I probably would have been a Tinkerer type with everything.
The biggest thing to convince me to never buy pre-built again is the proprietary and lock-in stuff. Freshman year of college I had to do without a computer for most of the semester when my Dell died because the parts could only come from them. When I wanted to upgrade my eMachine - I found they’d designed the case to make that impossible.
Specifically in respect to your use of the machine for gaming and in response to the article you linked: What has worked for me to both save money and reduce complications is to make my computer work well enough for the most demanding game I want to play. I mostly play indie games (which run on anything), but my last 2 or 3 graphics cards upgrades have been in response to the requirements to run the latest Civilization at the highest settings. This means that if the Nvidia 10 is $600, I can usually get the Nvidia 8 or 9 for $200 and it meets all my needs. (And a lot of the driver issues have been worked out)
I really hope VR pans out this time. I have yet to try the Oculus Rift, but I have been following it long enough to have fully drunk the Kool-aid.
The only thing that worries me about the Rift is the extreme hardware that seems to be required to run games at a framerate that won’t make people sick. Hopefully the programmers and designers work enough magic to keep the minimum hardware requirements at a reasonable level.
If not, the need to have a high-end PC could limit the potential market for VR headsets, and push the virtual reality dream into the future once again.
We have a Rift unit that people can use at our library. I have demoed it on generic Dell all-in-ones with onboard GPUs, and I have also plugged it into high-end gaming rigs in our gaming area. In my experience, the frame rate issue has more to do with the current state of the drivers, the physical display resolution, and the fact that most Rift experiences are poorly optimized proof-of-concepts cobbled together by enthusiasts. The GPU is important, but good frame rates are possible on a midrange machine, I think.
I am still glad to have a reason to upgrade my machine though
I was also thinking of the recent Apple Mac Pros - apparently Apple negotiated an amazing deal on the video cards, because putting together an equivalent “Hackintosh” was impossible at anything approaching that price, at least when they were new.
I’m a IT guy and have built my own gaming rigs but don’t anymore. The reason is time and money. I can buy a dell xps 8700 and drop a video card and a power supply in it and in twenty minutes or less I’m gaming. The pc cost $800.00 and comes with an O/S. The vid card costs $250 and the power supply cost $50. So the prebuilt is $1100. If I got the same parts from new egg I’d be around $1250. It would take two to four hours to build and configure and the performance would be virtually identical the prebuilt with a nice vid card in it.
Both the prebuilt and dig in this scenario are i7 4th gen. 8 GB ddr3 ram tbyte HDD and nice vid card and power supply.
Right now I have an at I HD 6950 and a 650 watt PS in a dell xps with an i7 and twelve GB of memory. All is stock but my vid card and PS and it crushes. All games an ultra. Took me no time to set up.
I have little time to do my hobbies so I have to max out that time and I’d rather game than tinker. If the day were cheaper that would be one thing, but for great performance dit is not cheaper.
I do it ( I bootcamp to windows tho, since no one supports 10.x OSX for my games but people will support (or not actively kill) XP ability to run some games ).
I could do otherwise, but that is what is in the room that offers safe harbour for gaming in my house, an old imac circa 2008
Back in the day of tools that you powered with your hands (real ‘hand tools’) carpenters did not buy their toolboxes. Your first carpentry task as an apprentice carpenter was to ‘build your own tool box’. It was the first piece of work you did in your new trade as a carpenter. It was their best piece of work.
That first tool box was where the young apprentice learned to saw a straight line, mortise and tenon, etc. Typically, carpenters kept that first tool box with them, their entire career. That toolbox also told all the other carpenters on a new job, their level of skill, and what they could do.
Cycle back to new millennium. There are a lot of geeks ‘out there’. Some only do software, others hardware and many do varying degrees of both. Your computer (essentially a toolbox), coincidentally is called ‘a box’ by hardware geeks. If you’re a hardware geek, you’ve likely ‘built your own box’. You build your own box, because you can, and it demonstrates to the other hardware geeks your ‘geek cred’.
