PCs: Why it’s better to build your own.
- ) Cheddar, Scratch, Dead Presidents, Dough, Samoleans, etc
Cost is the number one reason building your own PC is preferable to buying a prebuilt in the desktop PC game. When buying a prebuilt system you are not only paying for the sum of the parts. You are paying for the warranty, man hours, and support. Overhead. Compare this to simply buying a part from a warehouse. Building your own PC often comes under by a couple hundred or more comparatively. Of course, you will trade these savings in for time spent building. Building your own allows you price out different parts from different sources to achieve even lower prices.
2.) Value
This ties in with the first point. You can obviously still get large amounts of RAM or a lot of storage with a prebuilt. However, you will not get high quality parts. Builders buy cheaper parts in bulk to help keep prices down. You may get slow RAM or storage. You may get a motherboard with an incredibly thin and flimsy PCB. You may not have enough expansion slots. The included power supply may catch fire if you attach anything else. Your motherboard may only support USB2.0, even in 2020. Connectors won’t be strong. These parts will inevitably fail sooner rather than later. Even with these cost reductions you will still pay a premium that very well may overtake the price of building your own.
3.) Customization
Another major reason to build your PC is customization! You call all the shots! Not some suit trying to squeeze every last dime. If you want to cheap out on a few select parts it will be your call! If you want everything to be top of line ridiculous you can do that! Maybe a mix of both extremes is what you’re after. You can do that, too. You can buy fast storage but a cheaper processor and/or a video card if you only want to stream video and audio at home. If you want to edit video you could need a fast processor, a powerful video card, and fast memory and tons of storage. Of course, customization doesn’t stop there. You get to choose how it looks! Nearly every component nowadays has a unique and striking look. We can’t forget RGB coloring… From fans, cables(!?), sticks of RAM, chairs, video cards, monitors, speakers, coolers, and of course, the cases! As you can see RGB lighting has become a major selling point. There’s much more that can be explained, but we won’t here and now. We’ll leave it like this: no one wants the exact same car, home, or tattoo as everyone else. We like our things to be explicitly ours. Your personality can’t show through copy and pasted slate.
4.) Learning
Building your own PC forces you to learn about how they work and what each component does and why. This can be rewarding in different ways. First and foremost this leads to easier troubleshooting. A single component can fail and cause the system to not boot or post. If you have an idea of how the parts work together it is far easier to find and fix the issue. It’s much preferable to run to your local PC part store and pick up a stick of RAM or a power cable than to send it all away for weeks on end only to find out it was a minor issue. Some people turn this newly found hobby and skill in to money! One could start doing minor repairs for family and friends for a few bucks. You could even apply your new skills to your job. Self sufficiency may even get you a raise!
Building a PC teaches much more than this. Budgeting, following directions, patience, etc. The list is nearly endless.
In conclusion… Sure it can be easier in the short term to just buy a PC if you have the money and don’t care as long as you can read your email and check out a few videos on YouTube(Which is completely fine!). But, nothing will ever beat building your first PC and pressing the power button for the first time and seeing your hours of research and hard work come together in success!