£1000 Gaming PC: Pre-Built or Self-Build?

dangermouse425

dangermouse425

dangermouse425

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Hi all,

I recently self-built my own rig to the spec in my sig, and I've since been asked my a friend of mine on advice on a new PC.

My response was the standard "self-build it, it'll be cheaper!" and I've offered to build it for him, which I'm totally happy to do. But how much saving can one actually make? He wants it mostly for gaming, things like Skyrim and Arkham City.

He is a bit of a tech-n00b, so I'm thinking that a warranty and reliability of a pre-built system might be better for him, rather than the flexibility and potential for tinkering of a self-build that I want from a rig.

I'm going for almost exactly the same spec as mine, which is:

Z68 mobo
i5 2500k
GTX 570
8 GB DDR3 RAM
~120GB SSD
~2TB HDD (Maybe 2 x 1TB RAID'd)
Win 7 Premium
Antec 300 case

Any suggestions or thoughts on the matter?
 
With the cost of HDDs youll be struggling to get that ATM, have a go, but I doubt it

For a prebuilt, have a look at something like the Arkham Annihialator add in windows youre more or less bang on a grand, a self built will work out either marginally cheaper (£50ish) or allow you to upgrade on components slightly. In the past the advantage has always been to allow you to include quality components which a lot of prebuilts dont, however theres no issues with that for OcUKs prebuilts, all quality components still
 
depends how good a mates you are, and how much you like being tech support if the self build goes wrong :).

have a look at the Intel 10200i in the system configurator.
 
Thanks for the recommendations, guys, I'll check them out.

We're very good friends, so I wouldn't mind helping him out if it went wrong at all, but I think he'd rather a pre-built if the difference in saving isn't really that much. I've had a look previously and there doesn't seem to be much in it. I guess the ultimate question is how much he's willing to pay for peace of mind on the warranty front.
 
dangermouse425 said:
I guess the ultimate question is how much he's willing to pay for peace of mind on the warranty front.
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not to sure on this, but keep in mind if a pre built has a fault its likely to need to ALL go back, hopefully someone can confirm/deny that.

whereas , self built , he can beg to borrow some memory or a graphics card off you to help test for issues :).
 
True. Plus, with the wealth of knowledge on places like OCUK forums, he's never going to be far from helpful information and instruction on any problems that emerge. So even if I'm not available to help him out, he should be fine!
 
I'll show him them, thanks. Though I suspect it'll be a case of me building it in front of him to teach him as we do it. I think it can be quite nerve-wracking if you've never built your own PC before, everything looks a lot more complicated than it really is. Once he's comfortable with putting it together, he might get more into the hardware side of things and be able to look after it more himself!
 
Seriously - you want to build a PC for a friend and don't think that you'll be tied into a no-cost lifetime support contract? :)

I never build anything for anyone anymore as it just ends up being a pain in the rear with people calling you every 5 minutes. Pre-build all the way!

I'm going for a pre-build on my next upgrade purely because my luck with hardware is god-damned awful and I find it frustrating when you have to mess around getting hold of spare parts to prove where the problem lies. ;) I'd rather pay the extra £50.
 
If the difference between building or getting a pre-build is about £50 then I've no idea why I was contemplating building. I was more of the belief that you are saving hundreds by building it yourself.

That Arkham machine above looks pretty good, though could maybe do with another 4g of RAM.

Are the OC machine easy to upgrade? It doesn't violate the warranty like it does with some vendors, does it?
 
Stat1c said:
If the difference between building or getting a pre-build is about £50 then I've no idea why I was contemplating building. I was more of the belief that you are saving hundreds by building it yourself.
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I think that was more the case years back when there were huge mark-ups on prebuilt systems.

The only thing I'd be a bit wary of would be the small print - ie: what support you get if you add an extra card for SLI etc.
 
Just specced a similar rig to the Arkham and there's about £60 between the custom and pre-built.
For his own peace of mind and warranty I might suggest the pre-built option. He has a laptop so losing his PC wouldn't be the end of the world if he needs to send it back under warranty or anything, and I'm not sure how much I'll be able to convince him to get into the techy hardware side of things like overclocking and tweaking.
Thanks for all the advice anyway, guys!
 
If you buy the parts new anyway, they come with warranty. So, if anything were to fail and you can narrow it down to the bad component just get that replaced or refunded.
 
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