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Help choosing a PC building company.
Im not here to debate about building myself versus complete systems. I respect the people that build thiers and why they do it ( customization and savings) and ask to respect mine ( peace of mind and artthritis in hands)'
I bought a custom Alienware in 2005 and its still kicking today as a unix machine for my wife. I understand dell bought them out. So in the market for a solid compnay to build my system. I have a budget of 3500 -3700 with a moniter. Wouldnt mind 3d ability to play blue ray 3d.
See lots of companies out there, Origin, Falcon Northwest, AVAdirect etc... Been saving last two years for this and would like a solid system that will last at least 3 years with what I get today except for maybe an upgrade a graphic card down the road. I play stuff like dragon age, witcher, Fall out and like to really get a good system to play the sequels.
Sorry live in US
Thanks for any advice.
Comments
Dunno where you live, here in Germany you check for a local store with a good reputation with folks that custom build *for* you if you don't want to mess with it. Competition is pretty high here so the prices are very good even compared to online retailers.
However don't ask non-savvy people about pc-shops, some stores rip them off by appearing nice but not doing much. If a computer serviceman does a good job you will hardly see him again.
I've been building systems for many years, and it's my preferrence to build my own. But if I end up in a situation where I don't have the option to build my own (like buying a laptop or buying bulk systems for a college), my first choice is always Dell. They have good deals and excellent service.
My first laptop I got from Dell, I had set the power adaptor on the floor next to my recliner, and accidentally rolled the recliner over the adaptor. The power adaptor quit working. I called Dell, they sent a new adaptor over-night at no charge with a prepaid package for sending the broken adaptor back to them. Quick and efficient.
The second laptop I bought from Dell, the motherboard died after the warranty ended. I called Dell and they fixed it for free, no charge.
The quality of their products and their service will always make them my number one choice. I've been really impressed with Dell over the years and I highly recommend them.
Again, i like custom built by a reputable compnay. I like dealing with one company for any waranty needs and tech support i can get with questions. That is important to me.
Hands down I would check out Falcon-NW. I have purchased gaming rigs from them for about 8 to ten years now without a single complaint. That includes having three vid cards go bad on me and replaced PROMPTLY within their standard 3 year warranty completely free (as it should be). Yes, systems can be pricey but you get a top of the line unit that will handle virtually any game you wish to put on it.
I don't wish to get into a debate on Dells but friends and family of mine have purchased from them and this is what they have found. Service is not very good. Warranties are also lacking. Dells are fine for everyday business usage but from gaming they are pretty much hit and miss.
Let's party like it is 1863!
If you were upgrading a system yourself, then you could do worse than starting with a Dell.
But, if you're looking for an out-of-the-box gaming rig, you'd probably do better to glue a monitor on top of a NES.
MAIN: LOTRO (Chedriin Azariah, Landroval), STO (Jay Andover)
SIDE: FFXIV, RoM, Wakfu
I have had great luck with Alienware both before and after they were bought by Dell. Mostly I like them because they tend to offer better warranties than other high end gaming PC's co's.
My recommendation would be to start by figuring out what you want on that budget, and then see which companies will build it for you. Let's suppose you start with a pretty nice $1500 gaming system as your baseline, and then your plausible upgrades are:
1) A bigger monitor. You can get a 30" monitor with a 2560x1600 resolution for around $1000. It's not just the inches. The higher resolution lets you see further off to the periphery.
2) Multiple monitors in Eyefinity or Nvidia Surround. Rather than one huge monitor, you can get three (or five) decent sized monitors and spread the game window across all three. AMD's Eyefinity approach is more versatile and more mature there, though Nvidia has their own version of it.
This is mutually exclusive with the first option on your budget. As compared to option 1, this gets you more screen space for cheaper, but it also leaves your screen broken up by monitor bezels.
3) Stereoscopic 3D. Both AMD and Nvidia officially support this, but Nvidia's approach to it is more mature. It will look dumb in a lot of games, as game developers haven't yet figured out what to do with 2D stuff, such as the game interface. And you'll also have to wear annoying glasses to make it work. This will add a few hundred dollars to the price tag.
This is mutually exclusive with options 1 and 2, as you can't go above a 1920x1080 resolution and have it work, because of the monitor bandwidth required for a 120 Hz monitor. On the other hand, you could get the 120 Hz monitor, not use stereoscopic 3D, and play games at a frame rate of 120 frames per second.
4) A solid state drive. Or, I'd argue that a good $1500 gaming computer already has an SSD, so for you, a bigger solid state drive. You know how you constantly have to wait for your computer to do things? You click to open a program, and sit there and wait a while, and eventually it opens. Wouldn't it be great if you could skip the sitting there and waiting part, and just have your computer do what you tell it, when you tell it?
With an SSD, you often can. If you're waiting on your Internet connection, an SSD won't help. But if you're waiting for anything else, if you had an SSD, you wouldn't have to wait, or at most, would have to wait a lot less. The drawback is the price tag of around $2/GB. But even if you need 1 TB of capacity, you don't need a 1 TB SSD. You get an SSD for the OS and your main programs, and put everything else on a hard drive. With your budget, you really should get something over 100 GB.
Not all solid state drives are equivalent. Look for a Crucial RealSSD C300, OCZ Vertex 2 or Agility 2, G.Skill Phoenix Pro or Sniper, Mushkin Callisto Deluxe, or some others based on a Marvell or SandForce controller. If a site says they'll sell an SSD, but won't say which one, then don't buy from that site.
5) A really high end power supply. You don't want to get a really nice system and then fry it with a bad power supply. Look for the Seasonic X-series, Corsair AX series, Antec High Current Pro, Enermax Modu 87+, Kingwin LZG or LZP, or NZXT Hale90. You can probably get by with a somewhat lesser but still pretty good power supply. I'd spend the extra $50-$100 or so to get a high end one on your budget, though.
6) Two video cards in CrossFire or SLI. If you're going for any of options 1-3, you really need this. Try two Radeon HD 6970s in CrossFire or two GeForce GTX 570s or 580s in SLI.
7) A full tower case, with lots of fans for lots of case airflow. Actually, you really should get this, too. This is mandatory, not optional, if you're going with option #6.
8) Core i7 processor. The prototypical $1500 gaming system includes a Core i5 2500 or 2500K processor. For about $100 extra, you can get a Core i7 2600 or 2600K, the best gaming processors money can buy. The K means you can overclock it, but is more expensive. If you want a large overclock, then get the 2600K; if you're not into overclocking, then save some money and get the 2600. Any processors other than the four mentioned in this point should be dismissed out of hand as thoroughly inappropriate for a $1500+ gaming system.
9) A high end motherboard. Some high end motherboards have an extra PCI Express chip on them to allow for two PCI Express 2.0 slots to simultaneously have x16 bandwidth. The Asus Maximus IV Extreme or Gigabyte GA-P67A-UD7 are examples of this. This adds maybe $150 as compared to a mid-range motherboard. It also means that if you want to overclock the processor, the motherboard won't be a meaningfully limiting factor.
10) A Bigfoot Killer 2100 gaming network card. This costs around $100, and will take several milliseconds off of your ping time, and maybe get you an extra frame per second or so by offloading network traffic from the processor. Occasionally it will help by a lot more than that in a badly coded game. It's not automatic whether you should get this, and it won't help with single player games at all. The card is optimized for latency, not throughput, and actually isn't that good at throughput, so if you're going to transfer a lot of stuff across a gigabit ethernet LAN, the card should be avoided. The thorughput issues are irrelevant to Internet use, though.
11) 8 GB of DDR3 memory, with a stock voltage of 1.5 V, in a two module kit with two modules of 4 GB each, and clocked at 1600 MHz. Actually, the $1500 gaming PC might already have this, but yours definitiely should. At most, it's an extra $60 or so as compared to 4 GB of memory. Getting more than 8 GB of memory right now is kind of ridiculous, but if you later decide that you need 16 GB, it will be easy to add more later.
12) Liquid cooled everything. Actually, I'd rather advise against this unless you're an overclocking enthusiast--in which case, you really should build your own computer, rather than buying it from somewhere else. But it is one way to spend an extra several hundred dollars on a gaming system.
13) A Blu-Ray player (add $70), or Blu-Ray burner (add $100). The latter can replace the usual $20 DVD burner, but the former cannot. Blu-Ray is not relevant for gaming, and won't be in the near future. But it is relevant if you want to watch Blu-Ray movies on your computer.
Get a barebone or complete system from Ibuypower.com, cheap, quick and they are pretty solid. The hardware isnt company specific, so you are free to upgrade it yourself as time goes on. Last time I ordered from them, they threw in some free stuff including a $300 upgrade to the cpu, so I really cant complain.
Check out DigitalStorm or CyberPower.....you can customize your build inside out with quality, name brand parts. They can even do the overclocking for you and add water cooling. The other companies you mentioned do make fine computers...but I've never bought from them mainly because your paying for the brand, and a case with their logo on it. I've found CyberPower to be on par to building it yourself...you can never beat building it yourself...but the types of places mentioned above pretty much just charge for the assembly fee and anything extra you might want like water setup, overclocking...all that, which you could do yourself.
http://www.digitalstormonline.com
http://www.cyberpowerpc.com
Brand computers suck (particularly HP, Compaq and Dell). It is extremely common that they are cheap with components to save them a few bucks while making your computer worse.
Go down to your local store and have them build one for you using the parts you want instead. It will still be cheaper than buying a brand computer and youll give the money to your local geeks, most of them are fellow gamers.
I now have an Aurora that I absolutly love. My previous ones were home built but that really got tired after a while.When you're specing them out just make sure you get the components that you really want. Do your research.
One general rule: if a company won't tell you exactly what parts they use, it probably means they're using the cheapest parts that technically meet their claimed specs. For power supplies, that's really, really bad. It's not so good for motherboards or hard drives, either. For an optical drive, that doesn't particularly matter.
I never used them personally because I build my own but I've heard a lot of good things about Ibuypower.com
Yeah, I seen some crappy builds over the years.
Lol, in one case did they put both the harddrive and the CD player on the same cable (it was before SATA), that automatically slows down the harddrive with 33% and saved the company 3 bucks at the time. And the power supply had no english text, just Chinese so I had to run a program to test it for him, same with the memories (one of them had broke and my buddy asked me to see if I could find the error).
I once made the misstake to buy a Dell (the company I worked at payed all taxes on it for me so it sounded like a good idea), never had I had so much problem with a computer, not even my old Cyrix 166 (yeah, I was stupid in 1995). That Dell had some really crappy components in.
I would defintely recommend trying out your local nerd store. These people take pride in their work. Depend on their reputation and customer satisfaction. They need your good word of mouth.
They will likely have several options for gamers that fall below your budget. They also warranty their work and parts. All the parts have manafacturer warranties anyway, so you dont need to worry about that. ITs very easy for a nerd to tell when its under manafacture warranty also. They will happily replace that fried motherboard when they see a swollen capacitor. They might not be able to replace the motherboard when you ripped out a usb port... thats easy to spot aswell.
Nerd stores thrive on local business, please atleast give them a shot. Otherwise, I second NW Falcon. They have really good customer service and some cool custom paint jobs on the case. With your budget, I am sure you want a baddass custom painted case.... and I certainly wont blame you.
I think someone on mmorpg needs to open up their own buildem store. Id be happy to build whatever computer u want, just ship me the parts and I will charge you 100 bucks plus shipping. The one reason I wouldnt really do this is simple. I cant be help accountable for shipping disasters. Like that 5 pound cpu cooler snapping your motherboard when UPS hits a speed bump. That is also the only reason I would never personally buy from NW FALCON. Shipping computers seems like killing small babies and cats... i aint doing it
http://www.pugetsystems.com/
Alienware has degenerated more and more into Dell as the years went on. When they were independent, they were a strong custom build boutique. Now they are just a video game brand of a mass produced product.
Check out Falcon Northwest and Puget Systems as potential replacement builders with a focus on quality.
But I also second the recommendation of a quality local shop, they are probably the best resource if you can find a good one, not only for price but for quality and support (but a horrible experience at best if they are anything other than good)
This, my primary gaming system is an Mx17, while the hardware is for the most part solid, they crammed a ton of proprietary hardware that regulates overclocking and whatnot into it.
Problem is, this hardware is poorly built and programmed, it was the first thing in my system to go bad, and was an annoyance even when it worked right. Instead of bothering to return it for maintenance I just opted to download firmware hacks to disable all of it permanently.
wrong . Ibuypower and a few of other custom build pc makers use high end name brand parts. HP, Dell, etc., those pc makers use mediocre generic parts produced cheap to drive up their margins. I would seriously though recommend learning how to build your own pc. There is plenty of do it yourself guides on the net and newegg.com tends to help you pair different components. Please be weary about having the local mom and pop computer repair shop build your pc as they try to drive the margins up as much as possible as they do not do high volume so you can expect a gtx 480 paired with a rosewill power supply in some scenarios. In order to cover the overhead...they probably want to make 300-400 bucks on this so anticipate that you are wasting about that much money. If you absolutely can not build your own pc, go with ibuypower as they buy their product in bulk so they do not need to mark their product up substantially like mom and pop who buy single parts generally as needed and most likely from newegg.com. FYI...don't piss your money away on a killer nic card as the price to performace ratio is not worth it. Use the $100 on a better video card or processor or something else and get more performance for your buck.
source: 5+ years employed as an IT Specialist.
^^This
These guys are good, with plenty of options to custimize your rig. Not the cheapest, but your rig will be solid.
Just curious, but who/what is wrong?
If someone isn't willing to specify the make/model of the parts they are using, I know speaking for myself, that I would assume that it isn't necessarily the same one that I would pick out for myself. Custom build sites do include quality components, but you usually have to specify them for a modest price increase. The "Basic" or "Default" option just says "High quality Component". In fact, to quote a few examples from IBuyPower.com:
"Certified CPU HeatSink and Fan" -- doesn't lead me to think that I'm getting a nice Zalman heat pipe or anything...
"Free Upgrade to DDR3 1600 - Corsair or Major Brand" -- sure, I might get Corsair, or I might get Major Brand...
The power supply manufacturer selection consists of:
Corsair, ThermalTake, XFX, Enermax, CoolerMaster, Silverstone.
Ok I admit there are some name brands in there, and some of those are good name brands at that, but...
Over half the power supplies listed are made by:
"Standard".
So, if I have to pay extra to get the reputable major brand, that leads me to believe that I am, in fact, not getting the reputable major brand if I just go with "Standard". In fact, being pessimistic by nature, I would assume that I would be getting total crap unless I choose to pay extra.
Not saying IBuyPower (or any other site out there) doesn't make good computers, I'm just saying that there is a perfectly valid and sane reason for wanting to specify each component in your computer investment, and not just accepting "Standard" or "Major Brand" as a worthy component, especially if you are looking at spending a lot of money on a build you are hoping will last several years.
Falcon Northwest.