[deadrock]

Does one save a great deal of money building their own PC? Is it straight forward or does it have Chinese instruction?

[montanajoe]

I would not say you save a great deal of money..actually you can end up spending more to customize the machine the way you like.

There are no instructions to speak of ..in Chinese or any other language.

For me its a hobby like customizing cars that I have been at since the days of the Intel 8086 processors, and quite enjoyable. In the old days hand building a stock machine saves alot but not really much anymore

[usconservative]

I built my "beast" for just under $750. My build includes:

AMD FX-8350
Cooler Master Water Cooler Kit
32GB DDR3 2400 Memory
128GB SSB Hard Drive
1.5TB SATA3 Hard Drive
MSI 970A-G46 Motherboard
EVGA GT-630 Video w/DVI & VGA, 2GB Memory
650W Power Supply
Cooler Master Tower Case (don't remember model#)
11 120mm Case Cooling Fans


One might think with 11 cooling fans this thing would sound like a jet. Nope, I don't even notice it running. It's sitting just under my desk and it's damn' near silent. I got lucky in that regard since I purchased 11 of the cheapest 120mm case fans I could buy ($3/ea.)

The MSI 970A-G46 comes with USB 3.0, SATA6 (6 drive ports), Gig-E, 8 Channel Audio, several PCI Slots, PCI-E slot and most importantly (for me) a real Serial Port that I actually do use.

The EVGA GT-630 isn't the fastest video card in the world, but I'm not a gamer so all I really wanted was decent quality desktop productivity performance from a video card.

If I tried buying a system like I built, I'd be paying somewhere north of $1,200. I built it myself for a tad under $750. I shopped very hard to get the best prices on the components I used, and I sourced from several different sources to pay the minimum price I could.

Thus far, it's been a screamer. I've had several Virtual machines (Linux, Windows Server, Windows XP) all running at the same time and the FX-8350 seems to handle the load well.

My base OS on it is Windows 8, slimmed all the way down to run in just under 600mb of Memory. All unnecessary services disabled, and unnecessary software components weren't installed when I loaded the OS.

Overall: VERY HAPPY. Thinking about wiping the SSD and installing latest Ubuntu Server first, then VMWare to run the other stuff I need to run. I use my system for my "work from home" computer along with all my amateur radio gear and the home environmental's (heating, cooling, alarm system.) It's been rock solid since I built it. Zero complaints.

[Bikkuri]

20+ years ago, it was cheaper (by half) to build your own PCs.. Since then, the prices of parts and accessories have gone up since more people started building their own.

Now, it costs almost double to build what I can buy as a name-brand... although, I still prefer building my own, since I know what is in it. The pre-built (brand name) PCs, put crap gear (memory, vid cards, sound cards, etc.; some stoops so low as to use your ram as vid ram, which takes the ram away from the cpu).