"Building Your Own"

Spurred on by the delivery of my recent purchases, and the familiar, pleasant smell of freshly picked PCB, I spent some time working out whether it’s worth building your own computer, or giving in to the marketing and getting a Dell.  The results pleasantly surprised me.

The first system I spec’ed out was an expansion on what I’d bought the other day: a lower end Core i7 system (XPS Studio 8100?).  Including the monitor, keyboard, mouse and additional gubbins that Dell makes you get, I was able to get a system for £1050 on scan.co.uk, compared to £1300 with Dell.

Suprised by quite how much I could save, I went down to the lower end, spec’ing out a lower end Inspiron 560, which boasted the mighty power of a Pentium Dual Core E5500 (which was released about 2 years ago).  I opted for the upgrade to 4Gb of RAM as it was on offer and would make finding a competitive price more difficult.  At first I also included a monitor, power surge, printer, etc.  Piling in the extras brought the Dell price to £815, which I was able to convincingly beat at £650.

Despite adding plenty of extras, which is probably where Dell makes more of its money, I was expecting a far small margin on such a basic low-end PC.  To see what I could do against Dell’s rock bottom end, I removed all the optional stuff, leaving me with just a box with a Pentium Dual Core E5500, 4Gb of RAM, keyboard, mouse, DVD±RW, 500Gb Hard Drive, Windows 7 Home Premium and Internet Security (McFail from Dell or Kaspersky from Scan).  Dell’s price was £389, whilst the products I picked from Scan came to £378, yes I was still able to save a tenner against Dell when building a system.

Of cause at the lower end, the price difference is quickly gobbled up by the additional half-day or so of work you'd have to do building the PC from the bits you bought from Scan, whereas the Dell can be pulled straight out of the box and put on a desk, plugged in and 30 hours later, the thing has finally booted… but at the upper end of the market, or for people requiring something a bit more comprehensive in their PC purchase, building your own (or supporting your friendly techie friend and getting them to do it for you) is still very much an option.