[throwback]

Me too. There's no guarantee building your own, but you know who the manufacturers of the parts are and have some idea of the quality. OEM's have to shave pennies wherever they can get away with it. Many times they stick in non-standard proprietary stuff that you can't replace or upgrade either. They make'm to go in the dump in 2 years.

[circlecity]

"but you know who the manufacturers of the parts are and have some idea of the quality."

But when you dig into it you find its the same motherboard companies building the mb for the Dells of the world as selling them off the shelf. Dell just got a few million dollars worth of bad ones instead of one. It just got too expensive to build them for me. I can buy a good pc off the shelf and upgrade the video card a lot cheaper than building it. And without the hassle.