Faceoff: Build Or Buy

Systems

Evil Little Drives

Guido
From personal experience, the only parts I've had break on me are hard drives. Luckily I back up most everything on to CDs and/or other drives. In returning these drives my experience with the manufacturers' RMA process has been, quite possibly, the worst one can ever expect to have happen: in one case Western Digital lost all of my RMA information, even IBM managed to send me a broken drive in return for my original unit.

In both cases I spent over a month trying to resolve the issue. I was two heartbeats away from yelling at a V.P. at Western Digital before a drive was finally shipped overnight Fed-Ex to me. While this isn't indicative of what usually happens, (I personally believe there is an international conspiracy afoot to perpetually keep me in a state of broken drives) it consumed lots of time and effort.

If you have better things to worry about, the OEM system is the way to go. They normally have comprehensive warranties on all aspects of the system. Of course one does run the risk of having a warranty run out and the part breaking, but usually these warranties last for years. Chances are if you got this machine for gaming, you'll sell it before any of the warranties ever expire.

Whoa There Tiger

Warspite
Wait wait wait... what do you think you're doing? You think you'll sneak this "Sure one part might be of questionable origin" by me? A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and a computer is only as good as its worst part. I don't care how fancy your graphics card is, how many MHz the processor pumps out or how much RDRAM you've got. The moment that no-name OEM motherboard fries, or the on-board sound decides to take a dive, your system is dead. Just as dead as when you bought that bad Western Digital hard drive.

And who says you have to buy online to customize your computer? If you don't feel it's secure enough, go to a local mom & pop shop, or a private firm that deals primarily with businesses. Sure you might pay a bit more at the small store, or have worse service at the business-oriented company, but both will offer you better deals than a big OEM. If something fails, take it back. It's only going to take you as long as getting off your butt and driving there. You get face-to-face contact, no sitting on hold with cheesy elevator music, and much less waiting. Some stores even offer "no lemon" warranties, on items like monitors. If they had to fix something once and it's still not working right, they'll just give you a brand new one - no refurbished crap. I will, however, concede the point about time and hassle. I don't really care about building and maintaining my own system, but when I build one for someone else, I hate it when they come back. Getting a call in the middle of the day to fix a bad driver install is not my idea of fun. In this case, it's probably better to take someone online and introduce them to Dell, Gateway or some of the gaming OEMs like FuturePower, GamePC or Falcon Northwest.