Case Study #1 - Custom-built PCs vs Store-built PCs

Hello and welcome. This is the first and many more to come case studies I've been thinking. This one's about discusses about half of the people in Manila prefers to buy store-built PCs rather than personal made (aka building your own). Let's start

Store-built PCs

At the time of this writing, 27,370 is $616

Here's one of the store-built gaming PCs. As you might notice, it is not yet at the highest builds for a $620 budget. 

750Ti might be a good high-end graphics card, It can run most games on medium to high at 1080p. Ultra 1080p on popular MOBA games like Dota2, League of Legends, or HotS. 

4GB of RAM would definitely perform the bare minimum of most games nowadays. If you read my previous build, I do also have 4GB of RAM running at 1866MHz, but I'll be upgrading to 8GB in the next few weeks.

Toshiba is considered one of the low-tiers in terms of HDD brands. It is easily overcame by brands like Western Digital, Seagate, or Kingston. And 500GB is not good enough for a $620. The cost difference of 500GB and 1TB hard drive is roughly $5. 

400W PSU might not be a good option for a 750Ti and an APU. Though unlike AMD, nVidia isn't power hungry, so an upgrade for a 400W would be needed to at least 500 or so watts.

Other than that, the remaining parts is considered "okay" for $550. 

Custom-Built

I'll try to do my own custom-built PC using the budget of $620. The parts I'll be using are considered brand new and came from Dynaquest:

CPU:  Intel Pentium G3258 ($73)

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-H81M-DS2 ($53)

GPU: Sapphire R7 260X ($134)

RAM: Gskill RipjawsX 1600MHz 8GB Dual Kit  ($67)

PSU: Corsair VS450 ($36)

HDD: 1TB Western Digital Caviar Blue ($56)
SSD: Kingston v300 120GB ($63)

Case: Tecware Omega ($25)

Monitor: Philips 203V5L 19.5″  ($85)

Keyboard + Mouse: A4Tech KRS-8572 Combo ($9)

Total: $601

Parts defined:

CPU -- Pentium G3258 is considered one of the best non-Core series Intel CPUs as of now. It can be overclocked from 3.2GHz to a stable 4GHz on stock cooler. 

Motherboard -- Not much to say, but it is compatible to the 1150-based CPUs. It also supports overclocking, has 2 memory slots, 2 USB ports at the back, but does not have USB 3.0 for front panel connectors.

GPU -- R7 260X is considered the AMD version of the best 1600x900p GPUs. Its nVidia counterpart is actually the 750Ti, but 750Ti is a lot more expensive the 260X. 260X's power consumption is covered by our 450W 80+ Corsair VS450.

HDD / SSD -- Here's what I'd said about the upgrade. With a $600 budget ($20 less than the store-built), I can get double the capacity of the pre-built and an additional boot drive of 120GB SSD. SSD performs up to 4x faster than a hard disk drive. Boot time takes an average of 5 seconds on Windows 8.1 than 15 seconds on HDDs.

Case: Tecware Omega is a local case here but considered too good for its price. But this case is only sold on few stores. It has front a USB 3.0, two USB 2.0, free 3 120mm fans (2 with no LEDs and 1 with a red LED), and a tinted window side panel.

Monitor: An upgrade from 1366x768 monitor to 1600x900 resolution is quite good. Though it is close to a full HD monitor, we can't get a 1080p on that budget. Well, we can, but we need to remove SSD and get a 4GB RAM instead of 8GB.

Conclusion

Overall, getting a custom built PC is far better than buying a pre-made one or a store built. But still, if you want to go for a store built, go for it. I'm not forcing you to go for the custom built, and a good side on the store build PCs is that when you need something to return for a warranty, they're there to assist you.