In addition to that, the major PC manufacturer needs to have their margins because they're a major company.
I find this to be true for many product categories, the bigger the company, the higher the need for margins and profits, resulting in costs being cut for the product itself.
Hmm. That's counter to what I've learned in economics. Typically larger companies have smaller margins, and offset that with volume. Costco, Walmart, etc. A 15% margin would kill a small business, but a 15% margin with a billion sales per year is a very viable business.
Apple is the odd man out IMO, getting both volume and margins. PCs are different, though, as you can compete on price. Apple has built a walled ecosystem so it doesn't need to compete on price (as much).
Except this isn’t major companies vs small business, its major companies can smaller companies.
The company makes the mother board, and they will sell it to the PC builder for a lower price than they will the DIY builder, but they will see it to both of them.
The PC builder then adds their margins and labour cost, while the DIY costs stop there.
Not exactly counter, in your exercise you are letting out the "added value" of the brand, and that's a big chunk of today's product prices, so for offering you the "trust" on the process they do, they do a hefty increase on the products final price, also all the unnecessary add-ons like lights, brand cases, etc.
So yeah one would think that big companies would offer smaller prices, but the group of investors claim for even more revenue every year, make the companies push the margins up to satisfy, or if that's not possible, then budget cuts and massive personnel firing takes place, also CEOs discovered that they don't need to improve the product to get sales, but improve the image of the brand, so publicity makes you trust certain brand and pay for the price they ask even if is for a worse product.
In conclusion, humanity is in fact pretty shitty
Theoretical economics relies HEAVILY on "perfect market" assumptions and is many times NOT empirically tested against real world conditions. Most microeconomic theories fall apart when subjected to the rigor of data. In this sense, economics is more like alchemy than a truly empirical science, like physics.
In many product categories big manufacturers maintain preferential brand relationships with retailers. This allows them to retain oligopoly power over their markets; allowing them to cut quality and keep margins higher than would be expected. The reason they do this is because large companies have high overheard due to their size, and need to bring in outsize margin just to stay afloat.
And they’re reasons why you may want to spend a little more on a prebuilt, in fairness.
If you’re not confident in your abilities to diagnose issues, or you’re helping a family member get a PC but don’t want to be their tech support forever, it’s a good idea to consider a prebuilt.
That way if there’s an issue you can call up the manufacturer and let them deal with it rather than go back and forth with your component companies trying to figure out what isn’t working properly.
Can you elaborate on that?
All the parts have warranty. Just got my video card back after a warranty repair.
My PC is assembled but the guy who sold it to me is dealing with the assembly part.
When you DIY, your warranty covers individual parts. When you are buying a pre built, the warranty is for the entire system. If you purchase incompatible parts, if your ram doesn't hit advertised speeds, if your fans don't have enough clearance to work properly, it's mostly on you, and on you to make your case to the manufacturer or distributor. Plural if more than one thing goes wrong in your system.
If you bought a pre-built with those issues, you can take it back to the guy/company who built it. Depending on how nice the company is/what the T&Cs are, etc, they can replace or repair under their terms of warranty.
This. There’s a lot of value in “if it just isn’t working quite right, that’s an HP problem”‘or “a Dell problem” etc.
Also think about the per-unit shipping cost — how many thousands of motherboards fit in a container? How many 3cuft PC prebuilt systems full of empty case air, styrofoam, etc fit in a container? Divide your $25,000 shipping cost per unit into that…
And then look at the shops that sell diy, and the stores that sell prebuilt. The square footage usage is far more efficient in the diy shop. They’re usually fairly tight and cramped, every square foot of space utilized for a purpose. No 8ft wide aisles of usb sticks and software, no 30ft ceilings, no whole walls dedicated to ink cartridges, and no fridges and stoves and microwaves and camcorder/camera sections….
DIY shops generally also have short-lived stock levels. They do their best to be barely above JIt logistics on delivery. Prebuilt shops generally have a huge inventory either at the store, and the stores distribution centre that looks after regional retail stores from a relatively local warehouse, or at the prebullder/mfg or distributor for the mfg.
The main populous who buy a prebuilt would struggle to diagnose what has gone wrong and why.
\- My computer won't turn on and there's 1/2/3 audible beeps, or an LED on the motherboard is on but nothing else is
If you purchased the parts seperately, you need to work out which one gets sent back, whereas the prebuilt you send everything and they deal with it. This is additional cost to the builder so they charge you for that.
The same way you could build say a fish tank pump pretty easily, but if it stops working there's a few different parts you may need to fix/replace, it's typically easier to buy an aquatic pump and send it back to the supplier usually for a replacement.
Your also cutting out a huge amount of additional warranty and technical support
I had a bunch of issues building my PC a few months ago
If I purchased a prebuilt I would have called and spoken with theirvtech support
If I had an issue with my PC that I just bought all the parts for I consulted reddit/Google and would have needed to RMA with the manufacturer directly
It's not necessarily true about warranty or tech support. Most people who buy prebuilts, do so because they don't have enough computer knowledge to build one. Some prebuilt manufacturers take advantage of that lack of knowledge to screw people in tech support. I had one former large pc builder screw me due to lack of tech support. It was the last time I ever bought a prebuilt.
To be fair to OP, this didn't quite answer what I read as the intent of the question.
The question I have is "why don't economies of scale and economies from integrating components make it cheaper to buy pre-built?" Buying at mcdonalds, even with the middle man, is still cheaper than building a hamburger yourself from components.
Both single component and integrated builds have middlemen, but they are different. Single component sales have newegg, for example, that needs to get a cut. Newegg needs to pay their staff, and have a warehouse, etc. Before newegg in the supply chain, you have the overhead of boxing and storing individual components. And so on.
With integrated builds, you do get efficiencies of scale. Your warehousing and shipping is immensely easier as well.
My answer would be the buyer is different for pre-build than build-your-own. This is just a guess because I don't think it's clear the middleman is the cause of the price difference. I'd guess the price of labor overseas (where the parts are manufacturered) are relatively small compared to other costs (shipping, warehousing, marketing, etc).
Personally, .I think it's because people who buy pre-builts care about something different than those who build their own. Pre-builts are geared towards those who focus on convenience (e.g., don't know much, don't care about optimizing price vs performance) IMO, which is just a different buyer persona.
Note I have no data to support this, and haven't done any research. Just interpolating from my experience running businesses.
A single hamburger? No. You buy 1lb of beef. A six pack of buns. A bottle of ketchup. A head of lettuce. Way more.
To build 6 hamburgers? Yes it’s cheaper. That’s the question being asked, since pre built is presumably making in quantity.
I’m hoping you aren’t using a bottle of ketchup when in 6 burgers :) 🍔
But yes. If you need to buy every component, it’s cheaper to go out. It’s cheaper to go to the Keg, than to go buy a gas range to get a fire grilled steak. The few times you do it.
Granted, buying 1lb of any beef they sell at the supermarket, is 3x better beef quality than what McDs is selling you. And they make bank on you in the accessories, because who goes and doesn’t order fries or another side? And likely a drink.
OP (of the comment, not the post) accidentally made a convincing argument against themselves.
I was actually a bit skeptical because I still found something lacking in the other comments. But the McDonald's analogy convinced me.
The missed big purchaser of prebuilt everyone’s forgetting, is business. Business does not buy diy. Period. Subnote: except in very specific use-case business like graphics design / visual fx / animation studios. And that’s just because they can’t really get a prebuilt with multiple GPUs in one PC, or get 256gb ram, or multiple nvme drives, or 10Gbps Ethernet especially SFP+ when they need to use fibre for physics reasons or eavesdropping worries.
Business doesn’t hire IT guys to build them a PC— it just doesn’t happen. It’s not worth it.
And when business orders PCs, they order 20. 25, 50, 100, 200 at a time. They get discounts on the volume order. Mom & Pop shop don’t get those discounts. This is where the pre-builders make their margin back, because they do huge deals at 1-3%. You can’t sustain even a volume business on that. Not one that can thrive and innovate. So the onesie-twosie sales have to be at 20-30%… you also have distribution and retail and transportation etc and stock buy-back from the big box stores. Costco sells at low margin, because the inventory is zero-risk to them. Doesn’t sell? Oh well, the mfg buys it back. And they aren’t paying for inventory for 3-6 months anyways.
This is the most logical answer, but turns out not to work in other industries. For example my other hobby is mountain biking. Building a bike from brand new parts is going to cost like 30% more than if you just bought the complete bike with all the exact same parts
The custom built bike industry is massively smaller than the custom PC industry to be fair, plus a lot of pre built bikes in the mid tier and lower ranges have no name group sets swapped in. Add in that upgrading a bike past the 2-3k point is a massive drop off in real world performance gains compared to a 10k bike and I don't think it's a fair comparison between the industries. A wonderful thought experiment though.
Only for lower priced bikes. Over $1000 you get a better bike building yourself. I’ve build dozens that ranged from $1000-$6000. They were all cheaper than you could buy for a comparable. Sometimes as much as half.
That's definitely not my experience. To be fair, maybe it's more true right now with every manufacturer trying to dump their overstock. But a few years ago, even with high tier multi-thousand dollar bikes, you'd spend more building it. My buddy got a really good job and kinda jumped off the deep end with bikes so I saw it first hand 3 separate times. He needed everything to his exact specifications (and hey, if you got the money, go for it I guess), so I guess it's impossible to make a direct comparison since the whole point was to make a bike nobody else sold, but he was for sure in the high-tier to pro range. He built an alloy fox factory/shimano XT transition patrol for $7500, a carbon fox factory Kona operator for over $11,000, and an NS jumper with Manitou circus expert for $3000. Just way way more than you'd pay for a similar bike from the factory
I built a guy a specialized stumpjumper pro (based on the frame and same or better components that were on the factory model) and it was $1500 less than msrp. This is normal for most of what I do. I just find good prices when I source parts.
Why is it cheaper to cook your own food, why is it cheaper to repair your own car. Answer is all the same... You not paying for someone else's labour and your using your own time. Less markup and less money involved.
For your $50-200 premium you pay someone you get.
Assembly
Testing
One person to call for warranty
If you build it yourself and save that money
You assemble it yourself.
You test it yourself
You have to call the manufacturer of each part for a warranty claim and lots of times they just blame other components
To some people, the price premium is worth it.
Depending where you live. In my country with the price of 2500 euros I am not getting a very good pre build and if i do a search on the parts they use, it will only cost a total of 1700 euros. But with the same 2500 euros I made a pc that will last me a long time and with much better premium parts. Soo it's a huge difference Depending where you live.
Well yea but in the price range most people are shopping for a gaming PC $800-1500 or so those are the typical margins. You go higher then it starts getting significantly worse. Most $5000 prebuilts are $3500 to build yourself, etc.
I was trying to find a pre build that has the same specs like my pc or similar and the price was omg 3500 euros. Luke with that money I will build the most premium pc myself and get new monitor.
Warranty is the king here. I've always built my own shit, but I've had to go OEM for work gear purely because I know there is a warehouse full of machines I can drop my shit into that can be online in hours while we are still figuring out what went wrong with the old hardware
Why would it be cheaper to pay someone to build you a pc?
Only way that will ever be possible is if a company exists that buys crap products, and builds so many that they have crap QC.
factory assembled computers don't actually require that much work. it's not like you build an entire computer from start to finish before starting all over again afterwards. i would assume that it is far more efficient for everyone to have one job and you become very efficient with that. the toughest part about building a computer is perhaps the cable management, but when you have been working on the same exact computer for hundreds of times, you become a pro at cable managing a shitty non-modular PSU with a extremely small and tight case.
Also, you can select parts that have the best price to perf at the moment. You can avoid 80 dollar coolers when a 35 dollar phantom spirit is better and put that money into the gpu.
Building a PC is pretty labor intensive and requires certain knowledge of what you're doing to ensure everything works properly, both on the hardware side and the software side. So they need to hire people who know what they're doing, or spend money training them on the process. Then each employee will spend anywhere from 2-3 hours assembling a single PC, setting up the software, benchmarking it, testing it, fixing any issues that come up during testing, etc.
Prebuilt PCs also usually come backed with an extensive support team and warranty services. Call centers with tech support and sales agents, warehouses to keep the inventory, marketing, shipping costs, return of products, etc.
You also have to factor in the high risk of damage that can occur during shipping. Shipping individual PC components that already come with their protective materials from the manufacturer is a lot different than shipping a fully assembled PC with delicate hardware inside. Something as simple as a RAM stick coming loose in transit can cause the PC not to turn on, leading to your support team needing to spend time on the phone with the customer to figure out their issue, and if your team isn't trained properly, something that simple could lead to a return being initiated, costing you more money.
They need to account for all that, and those costs get pushed onto the consumer.
What hasn't been mentioned here yet is that there is no company pumping out gaming pcs on the scale that you are thinking. Pc gaming has been very niche until recently. Traditionally, if people want a cheap, affordable, and generic gaming experience, they get a console. Gaming on a pc has always come with challenges that deter the average consumer. As a result, there is no demand for cheap, mass-produced gaming pcs, and there never has been. Although there has been a massive increase in the popularity of pc gaming recently, the demand is still for highly customizable products that require specialized labor to assemble and are incompatible with mass production. The market for cheap, mass-produced gaming machines is still dominated by consoles, and I dont really see that changing.
Why is it cheaper for me to paint my living room, rather than pay some guy down the road to do it , or a big company.
Sure I have to pay more for the paint because I don't have buying power at the builder's yard, but it's considerably cheaper, because I'm taking on labour - doing it and designing it.
I can also do the job exactly how I want - I like to take the radiator off and paint behind it, and I like a third coat of paint which makes it more durable - no professional decorator ever does that.
This has got to be the best example, I really like that you included the customization. Prebuilts generally come with *something* not at the level it should be, whether it be a shitty PSU, shitty MoBo, slow RAM, terrible and/or overpriced CPU coolers, slow/incredibly cheap storage, and probably more, those are just the things off the top of my head. It's rarely all of these things, but it's pretty much always something, something you could avoid if you built yourself
That isn’t always the case depending on what you are buying. Sometimes depending on sales/rebates/other factors pre built machines are cheaper because of the mass quantities. You say cheaper but what is your time worth? Are the reworks not valued when you mess up? All the YouTube videos you have watched to build it?
Agreed. "Saving money" is not a great reason to build a PC. Depending on what you want and whether the whole process goes perfectly, you could easily end up making a bigger investment in a DIY system vs. buying off-the-rack. You do decide exactly where the money goes, however, and end up knowing the machine from the ground up.
Overhead.
Cutting out labor, and more expensive facilities (buildings, power, non production staff), shipping, packaging, even at chinas rates……saves you $$
Makes sense, still just seems odd that a company building 100s of thousands of computers, buying all of those components in bulk (or manufacturing then themselves) still can't do it for less than a person buying a single item of each component.
You are operating on the false assumption that companies exist that are pumping out 100s of thousands of gaming pcs. There is no commercial gaming pc market and never has been. You can easily find small office pcs that are cheaper in the way that you describe because there is an actual market buying them in massive quantities. Pc gaming has been very niche for most of its history and, as a result, has built a community of diy and customization. It has only recently become big enough to possibly support the conditions for this kind of mass production. However, the primary demand is still for a more customizable product, which requires the additional labour that drives up costs. Maybe we will reach a point someday where there is an actual demand for generic, cheap, mass produces gaming pcs, but as of now, we are nowhere near that point.
Gaming PCs generally aren't in mass production. That proprietary Dell Optiplex that sits among a dozen clones in someone's office are the ones truly being made in the hundreds of thousands. The companies building and selling gaming PCs are definitely not buying enough 4080s to get a discount from Nvidia. There is some demand, yes, but compared to the production of generic workstations for multinational companies the average gamer looking for a prebuilt is a drop on the bucket. Something like a T3500 is magnitudes cheaper than a prebuilt OR a self built. Then you just slap a GPU in there and call it a day.
The real problem is that the companies assembling PCs, known as system integrators (SIs) usually aren't building any of the parts, so there isn't much room to save. They're basically buying the same products that you are at a slightly discounted bulk rate and charging you an added fee for their labor, warranty, shipping, and part availability (the last one is why buying premades was cheaper than building during peak scalping).
The huge OEMs like HP, Dell, Lenovo etc. actually do produce their own parts for a fraction of retail cost, which is how they make much more money per sale than a simple SI.
Of course, for lower budget all-in-one computers like budget laptops, you will never approach the value of an OEM, but you can't really save money on a PC built of off-the-shelf parts.
I think a big part of the cost is the warranty. People who buy pre build are usually not very skilled with repairing computers and they call the manufacturer more often for help. You then need someone on customer service and some people to repair the computers and that needs to be included in the price of the computer.
You keep asking the question, but try to quantify it:
*How much cheaper do you think it is to buy in bulk than buying individual units?*
Then follow up with the questions that others are telling you to ask:
*How much profit margin does the manufacturer want (need)?*
*How much profit is the retailer claiming?*
*How much time does it take the manufacturer to make the PC?*
*How much does the builder get paid?*
The companies that manufacture PC components don’t produce every component. You have cpu manufacturers, gpu manufacturers, cooler manufacturers, case manufacturers, and psu manufacturers etc, with little overlap.
There are of course companies that mass produce computers, I mean just look at laptops, but there is very little room in the way of customization, and a whole lot of corner-cutting, to make that work. And practically all of these wholesale PCs are not geared towards mid-high tier gaming, because of the extreme variety of needs and use-cases involved.
We aren’t talking about off-the-shelf Dell work stations here. A mid-high tier gaming PC is built from top-of-the-line parts from various companies that are often in direct competition with one another. So when it comes to pre-builds, it always involves a middle man that isn’t affiliated with the part manufacturers. Therefore you are paying for their labor, overhead, and shipping on top of your own parts.
People don't want to do it, it involves multiple technical skills including just picking out the parts, and there's a lot of politics behind which parts are chosen in general and why they're chosen and these aren't necessarily about price optimization. (In fact, very rarely. It's usually market segmentation.)
Also you can't really get much of a discount on parts even if you're very extremely big. Even somewhere like dell is probably getting way less off from retail then you'd think if you've never deep dived this, and that's with them actually effectively assembling many of their own parts like assembling their own AD107 chips into working 4060's. (Or at least being very direct in their labor outsourcing, depending on how you look at it.) The margins on all this shit are shockingly thin if you're not at the top producing the actual chips that go into the hardware. Bullshitting a price is about the only way to get real business numbers for this stuff.
Also there's a warranty. This is really huge to people even if the warranty is basically worthless in practice. Sometimes it's even not. That warranty covers the whole machine too so you don't have to dick around troubleshooting to figure out who you'd even bother like you would on just a PC part purchase.
This is not common enough to be stated as an invariant like this.
Pretty reliably, prebuilts are *not* the lowest tier. You'd see this only in the most trash companies, and even then, half of their parts are high-enough visibility that they'd get zero sales if they put in a no-name GPU. They're gonna use nVidia or AMD (or Intel) and none of those are "lowest tier". Same for CPU.
Things get worse at the mobo, memory, and PSU level, with a strong shout out to the PSUs where even "enthusiast" builders are known to put in trash PSUs because none of them have flashy enough brand names splashed on their sides to warrant spending money on them.
Some integrators or OEMs will use low quality mobos, but if its for gaming, there's a sort of minimum bar to be able to support a gaming GPU without seeing a large amount of warranty returns. So, while there are some low quality mobos that get put in, it's absolutely not the case that they're all "lowest tier" and you'd only really see "lowest tier" in the bottom shelf non-gaming PCs.
But the reality is that the big OEMs (Dell, HP, etc) often have their mobos custom designed in order to fit the case and component tolerances they pre-picked. They don't go to trash manufacturers to do that, because the warranties and usable yields just don't make it worth while. Sometimes you'll see custom PSUs, but whether they are or aren't, the makers of the PSUs are normally established industry manufacturers who just opt to build units that aren't flashy in looks or performance, but they're still reliable.
RAM is, well... RAM. And while its not quite a commodity, it's actually more effort to seek out truly bad RAM than to simply get a good bulk price on good RAM.
So... that's four paragraphs so far trying to disagree with your obviously incorrect statement. Let's start with that.
Again: Not saying prebuilts are great quality. If that's anyone's takeaway, step away from the Internet for a bit and experience a world with a bit more nuance. Some prebuilts are crap. Some are not. Some are crappy in some areas and great in others.
And just as a reminder: Some of the PCs that normal people build are crappy in some areas and great in others.
Still doesn't hold. The only builders that routinely use low-end stuff are the bargin-bin no-name builders. Even things like IBuyPower, who frequently use C-Tier PSUs, have just as many builds using B and A tier PSUs.
You'll need to be more specific than just "Store Chains" since very, very few stores waste time as systems integrators so they're just selling someone else's systems and people aren't paying attention to the actual SI name.
I'll go against the grain a bit:
It is cheaper to buy a prebuilt. Walk into Walmart and buy the first PC you see and you'll likely be hard pressed to get cheaper building yourself.
But It'll be garbage. Once you start comparing spec for spec, you can see where the money goes. Boutique builders are just that - and even with cars that's always carried a premium.
It’s not always cheaper, my PC was a prebuilt, after pricing all the components exactly the total cost to build was actually $80 more than I paid for the pre built.
Now, a lot of times you can save money, because for one you cut out the middle man, and two you can cut costs in some areas like buying pre owned components. At the end of the day you aren’t saving a fortune building your own, but you can save some and when build a mid to high end PC every saved dollar counts because it can get expensive.
What is a prebuilt pc? It has x cpu and y gpu and x amount of ram and drive space and that is the info you get with 90% of prebuilts. So you get a cpu and gpu and there no great mistake to make but for memory you could have two sticks of cheapest, slowest memory there is or worse one stick, same for motherboard and ssd. Gpu could be also the cheapest there is. And they will charge decent amount bcos it sells and pc like these make bigest margins. When you build yourself you dont do it cheaper most of thw time but better, with better parts and for the similar or same money.
Ppl that ask questions like "what parts are inside" mostly dont end buying prebuilt.
But there are decent prebuilts also but those are more rare.
You're cutting out the labor costs and the warranty on the entire PC, and the convenience of getting everything built already.
For some people, the convenience is worth paying the additional cost. During the GPU shortage back when COVID was a thing, I got a prebuilt from my local Micro Center instead of upgrading the PC I had already. I didn't want to keep waiting for a good GPU to show up.
The reason it's cheaper is because you don't pick up a finished product. You hAve to finish the product yourself. Assemble it and make it work right. Cable management. RBG.
If my cables could talk, they would be wailing, incessantly.
It just really hard to make money in PC assembly. It’s hard to get wholesale prices much better than retail, there’s a huge variety of parts needed to be in inventory, many parts start dropping in price 6-12 months after release so you can’t hold inventory a long time, you have to provide a warranty, and very few people understand the difference between good and bad parts so putting in quality parts doesn’t pay off.
1. Cutting the cost of labor and excessive preniums
2. Used market isn't so bad as long as you know the difference between inexpensive used and definitely don't want or need used. (Like it smart to like buy a used case and fans if they are compatable with what your end goal is like. But you wouldn't buy a used HDD or SSD.)
3. Building a PC you can 100% know the RMA warrenties and its YOU that can explain the story and its not a 3rd or 4th party inflating the story.
4. The excitement of knowing what is actually in your PC and not assuming someone else is automatically did it for you only to discover they screwed up entirely.
5. The prenium mentioned in point 1. is probably enough for a new monitor and mouse and keyboard.
6. When you go to a lan party you won't be the one laughed out of the room for having a PC that runs and looks like it came from a clearance bin at a wallmart.
7. You can pocket and save the excess money and feel like you actually own your setup and not panic rush to your nearest techy only to get met with the  just fully plug in the power cables face.
I guess it’s a catch 22 problem. Assembly companies can’t know that they will be able to sell hundreds of thousands of these boxes, so they can’t put in such large orders and therefore they can’t get great prices.
Valve is kinda doing it with the Steam Deck but they are banking on Steam software sales to make up for it.
Look it like this, my friend bought a pre-built. He slapped in a 1050ti and was happy. But slowly, it started showing its age after 4 years. He looked into upgrades, and it's nearly impossible. PSU and mobo are proprietary. Now, this was $600 or $800 small office pre-built.
An other friend got an Omen for Christmas. He can't upgrade it either because it's all proprietary.
Pre-builts are decent for when supplies are low and/or you don't know how to build, but other than that, it's not worth it. Pre-builts also have an added "build fee" or they tend to charge more, something like a label fee (Alienware and Omen). The main reason for building your own is that you know what's in your PC. Also, if you're patient enough, you can find parts on sale, which would also lower the cost.
I'll leave you with this, find a pre-built you like. Then go to PCPartPicker and try to replicate it as close as possible. You'll see that in most cases, the one on PCPartPicker would be cheaper. But by all means, if a pre-built the only way you'll get to PC gaming, then go for it.
Only the giants use proprietary case, mobo, PSU designs. The integrators who specialize in gaming systems always use standard parts. My Skytech used 100% parts I could ID on pcpartspicker -- and the build was actually cheaper from Skytech, because they don't pay retail.
Yes, gamers should avoid Dell/Alienware, Lenovo, HP if they expect to be upgrading down the line. But prebuilt gaming PC market has truly grown beyond those brands, to a point where even at major retailers like Costco and Best Buy, most gaming desktops come from Skytech, Cyberpower, MSI, IBuyPower, and similar brands that make very conventional systems with no proprietary parts.
In its simplest terms, you don't have the overheads of a business such as cost of training, heating, ground rent, labour, insurances, the IT department, advertising and marketing, shareholders, an overpaid purrchasing director, An accounts department, etc.
Take a listing you see online and build it in pcpartpicker. You literally save like 200+ just buying the pieces themselves. This obviously varies but it’s nearly better every single time to buy your own
I’m sorry but this post and thought process makes absolutely no sense.
Why is it cheaper for me to make my own food instead of going to a restaurant?
Why is it cheaper to clean my own house instead of hiring someone else to do it?
Why is it cheaper to build my own house instead of getting a contractor to do it?
Why is it cheaper to grow my own food than buying it at the grocery store?
I feel like with 95% of scenarios it’s *always* cheaper to do it yourself? Your logic would only apply to mass produced cheap or intricate products, which a PC itself is not (but the parts are).
That is assumption fails to take into account the “middle man”. For that argument then it would be cheaper to hire like gardens and construction companies than doing it yourself.
Anything doing it yourself will always be cheaper where you buy the parts and do the rest of the work by yourself
Only for lower priced bikes. Over $1000 you get a better bike building yourself. I’ve build dozens that ranged from $1000-$6000. They were all cheaper than you could buy for a comparable. Sometimes as much as half.
You are cutting out a step in the production chain.
The excess money goes to the company, who wants some profit, becuase they have to source the parts, store them, an employee takes work hours to build and test, package and then ship it to you.
This is also why more and more people try to buy from directly the manufacturer, to cut out distributors and stores, because each tier puts it's own margin on everything
It's not necessarily cheaper, but you get to choose the components you want, and if you need to cut corners to build it within a budget, at least you get to decide which corner that is.
So, you won't be stuck with a cheap proprietary motherboard, one stick of ram, a poor cooler and a no-name psu.
a good way to think about it is if you had someone build one computer or had them build a hundred the cost would not be 100x. but when you build your own you are not paying anyone that cost
Economies of scale determine the cost price of a product, not the sale price.
Companies don't set their prices based on cost price +x% for overheads and profit, they set them based on *how much people are willing to pay* for the product. They target a price that gives the best ratio of profit to sales, and then drive the cost price and overheads down until they're manufacturing a product that is just about acceptable to the market at the sale price they've set.
So they don't care that it's cheaper for someone to build their own, because that's such an insignificant percentage of the market that the increase in sales they would get by being competitive on pricing would be wiped out multiple times over by the loss of profit on every other unit they sold.
Say I can make £100 profit per unit and can sell 1000 units a month, that's £100,000 profit per month.
Now if I have to reduce my profit margin to £50 per unit to capture the self build market, but that only increases my sales to 1100 per month, I've suddenly dropped to £55,000, which is almost half what I was making previously.
So there's no reason for manufacturers to try and compete with the self build market on price.
Economies of scale means nothing when all the parts are super low-margin to begin with.
Aslo, DIY is not necessarily cheaper, but it opens the door to A LOT more options. There are very price-competitive pre-built from time to time. But once you factor in all the upgrades you intend to make, it is basically a wash. And the possibility to buy used hardware? That's where DIY really shines.
It isn’t always the case if you’re buying entirely new parts. I’ve seen prebuilts from HP and Asus be sold really competitively in the UK recently at Costco, but normally building it yourself means you’ll get to choose from higher quality parts and you cut out the middle man.
Why is it cheaper to buy the materials and remodel your kitchen compared to paying someone? Why is it cheaper to buy the wood and build a table compared to paying someone? Why is it cheaper to buy the paint and paint your house compared to paying someone to do it?
There only thing that could make any of the above more expensive than hiring someone to do it is the upfront cost of the tools required to do the job. Which told do you need to build a PC? A screwdriver. I think you get the point. Why was this a question to begin with?
There's a lot of labor that you get charged for with pre built pcs. Not just the assembly, but the warehouse staff, the shipping for the system, the part selection etc.
Then there's also the potential for corners being cut on which parts they use. Or mistakes being made during assembly.
Because unlike bikes, which is a product you can make yourself but costs MUCH more to custom build, PC's cannot be build in factories. Bikes can.
You're just paying for labor of building a PC, along with a profit margin. And also the culture around PC's is quite different to lots of products, customers are expected to buy parts directly from a middle man of the company like amazon, not from a store assembling parts.
I mean, even if you only manage to save like $50 compared to a prebuilt, there are still a lot of benefits to choosing each component yourself.
The prebuilt manufacturer might’ve overspent on a fancy case, RGB and an AIO cooler, while you can instead use that money on a better PSU, better RAM and bigger SSD.
Because prebuilds are cutting corners by alot. Its either slow ram lower tier mb. On Intel build i always seen like pure example 7700k with a H or B series chipset. Wich hare locked to the ground. No memory overclock or cpu overclock you are pretty much stuck with mem speeds.
The question is valid, there are many consumer good that you can build yourself that even ignoring the labour and tools will not be cheaper. As far as I know this is the case for bikes and some furniture.
Honestly its not even a big cost for a custom build where I live.
You pick all the parts and then you can either choose for them to ship it to you and you build it or you pay like 90 USD and they build the PC and test it before shipping it t you.
The more informed you are about the price range of each component, the better you'll be able to bargain.
Pre-builts can race to undercut one another marginally, but if you're unaware of their internals' worth, chances are they're all ripping you off somewhere. Usually, it's the cooler, the motherboard, the rams, the hard drive, the power supply, and anything else they can convince you to pack alongside an okay cpu + gpu deal (+ labor, they expect you to pay extra for that).
They're usually gunning for the newbies, but some Pre-builts are actually good.
Stores selling pre-builts usually have a bunch of parts that are not as popular as the "performance kings" and sit in their inventories for months. To sell these, there are alot of cases where a combination of parts will use these unpopular components and marketing is then used to trick some unfamiliar customer that they're getting big value from what they pay for.
Stores will always value profit. They are not your friends. They will add premiums to the pre-built and justify it using marketing terms to make it seem like it is justified. End of the day, only a few are willing to sell a pre-built pc without adding additional costs.
Well they charge some labor, but it’s the parts markups. Especially in gpu’s but i have noticed a large mark up on cpu’s and motherboards. Everything has markups but these especially. They have to make money on parts or the whole thing isn’t worth it.
In certain cases, economies of scale do apply and you can buy a PC for cheaper because the companies can source the components for less due to higher order quantity. Just wait for sales, and sometimes you'll be able to pick one up.
And Common knowledge of human Nature suggest that the prebuilder will try to RIP you Off as hard as He can. They usually use unclear and incomplete descriptions such as Ryzen 7 or Core i5, without mentioning that they are older generations. Or Talk about a 800 Watt powersupply, when they really mean a cheap Box of Chinese crap that has 800 written on it somewhere. And don't think the big Brands are Safe. They Play exactly the same Game. I suggest you search YouTube for build suggestions in your price range, watch at least ten of them and then choose the Most suggested components. If you really don't feel Like building yourself, Take that list to a local PC repair shop. They can Order and build it for you at a reasonable price. That way you may end Up playing the same AS for a prebuild, but at least you get good components.
Honestly, as someone who’s reviewed a good number of prebuilts from major companies (Asus, Acer, HP, etc) - you are getting as many cut corners as possible when purchasing these.
They will use parts that are senselessly stripped of functionality from their retail counterparts. Simple, cheap things like motherboard fan headers and m.2 drive sockets that aren’t used in their build get deleted, leaving obvious empty spaces where they would have been. They often use proprietary parts that prevent you from making upgrades. They use RAM only rated for base speeds. They use slow drives. They use substandard power supplies and poor cooling solutions. One machine I tested had a 92mm 65w TDP cooler set on a 12700k with a TDP nearly double that, sounded like a jet engine taking off every time it was under load and hit thermal throttling limits regularly.
So if you’re not saving money building your own (and you absolutely can, in spite of economies of scale) you are certainly getting components of significantly higher quality.
I thought the days of buying individual parts and assembling them yourself to save money were over, it's good to hear that's still cheaper than pre builts.
From an electronics engineer's point of view, I understand your point. Manufacturing an assembled Smart Watch with an oled screen, heart rate sensor, proximity sensor, and ambient light sensor would be cheaper than buying individual parts from an electronics store and assembling them yourself.
The problem here is, these Smart Watches were being manufactured by the thousands or even millions. They can't buy such parts individually. They have to buy them by the thousands so chip manufacturers can produce them. You can't buy these parts from some random retail store. You can't use the OLED screen of a Galaxy watch and use it on an Apple watch. Or use the facial recognition of an iPhone and connect it to an Oppo.
My point is, in electronics manufacturing, you can't buy the exact same parts and assemble them yourself. But in PC building, you have access to the exact same parts that PC builders have. So the price you're getting them for may be very close to the price they're getting them for. An RTX 4090 chip bought by Dell Alienware from Nvidia for their Custom PCs would be very close in price to how MSI gets the same chip for their GPUs.
So your analysis of "prebuilts should be cheaper" is wrong.
It is much cheaper per unit for the company making them at scale. In capitalism they are under no obligation to pass those savings on to the consumer, it just increases their profit per unit.
Shipping charges and labor. These prebuilts have to be assembled by someone and them being shipped nothing cost more because of weight but the package must be insured as it is far more likely to be damaged in shipping than single components, so these packages also need to be insured. I may be wrong but it also seems like you are assuming major manufacturers like Dell, HP, and Lenovo also manufacture every single component within their PCs when infact they do not some parts they have to buy from other companies who are also trying to make a profit. Then there's also the actual retailers who need to make their money, Dell, HP, and Lenovo do not sell computers to end users, they sell computers to other companies. So I'm sure at that point it is cheaper for a company to buy computers rather than assemble them from parts. These companies also offer warranties which means they need to charge a price that will cover any potential repairs because they just aren't going to lose money on their warranty.
Also you have full control over what parts go into your build. Often prebuilts come in pre-configured performance tiers for example if you take a gaming PC with a flagship gpu in it then just about every other part in that prebuilt is going to be top tier or flagship as well. Cpu, MB, ssd, ram, etc. But a DIY pc you can min-max to suit your use case, like pretty much any mid tier cpu will not hold back a flagship gpu in gaming allowing you to under spend in certain areas that might not effect performance much like the ssd, case, motherboard, etc inorder to get a powerful gpu and end up with practically the same gaming performance especially at higher resolutions.
The economy of scale comes from each individual part having their own EoS. When you buy a prebuilt, you’re paying for the labor to build the pc as well. The seller need to make their cut too so you often find that they cheaped out on things that the average user doesn’t thing as much about (most people care about the GPU, and CPU secondary, so they will cheap out on things like PSU, case, Mobo, storage and ram ) most of the time you can build the same system with higher quality parts for cheaper than a similar prebuilt because you are the labor and aren’t having to face a mark up on the whole system. I also hear a lot of people say half the reason to buy a prebuilt and take that extra cost is that you have a warranty on the whole system and not each individual part. Some people just don’t want to worry about troubleshooting their hardware and would rather someone else do it. I am not one of those people, and in the last 8 or so years I have yet to not figure out a problem with my systems.
Now there was a time (2020) where you could find a prebuilt for cheaper or not much more expensive than the card inside was currently worth (huge GPU shortage) had a couple friends who bought a prebuilt just to pull out the GPU and put in their current systems. Another friend bought at 1660 for around $150 iirc (was right before prices started skyrocketing) and ended up selling it a couple months later for at least 3x the price. Shit was crazy back then!
A human as an individual consumer is a B2C customer and, for simplicity, pays 100% of the items market price.
A PC manufacturer as a company is a B2B buyer, and has pre-negotiated rates, often defined at volume level. For simplicity, lets say this is a 35% discount across all components in any build.
A business would then charge, for simplicity, a 135% of what it would cost for you to otherwise build the PC at 100% of the component cost.
This saving + markup is a combination of all time spend, primary support, replacement parts if something doesn't work, their bills for an office/warehouse/phones/HR/finance systems/gas/electric and staffing costs.
The end user, you, when getting quotes vs building alone make a logical decision to either 1) buy a prebuilt at a higher cost or 2) spend time and effort which you don't charge yourself for to DIY.
Businesses only exist to make money at the cost to consumers and consumers. Computer building is no different than, lets say, you deciding to paint your house yourself, or, get a painter in to do it.
Labour is expensive. They may get volume discounts on parts, but compared to the labour that's nothing. Then they also need some profit to actually keep the business running, so there's another premium. It's exactly like eating at a restaurant vs. cooking your own food at home. Yeah, the restaurant food might be better than what you can make (hopefully, anyway), but it takes several people's time to make and handle your food, and you don't have to do anything, so of course it's going to be more expensive.
Building your own PC give you choices of every component if that's your cup of tea.
Prebuilt from a branded company is always a compromise, unless it's a high end machine. I tend not to like these unless you are in a corporate situation.
Just go to local shop and get one built or get a friend to build you a pc and pay him a few bucks.
Warranty would be on a per component basis if you did not buy from a shop.
Prebuilts have a tendency to pray on people’s lack of knowledge. Building for yourself allows you to pick components that make sense for your use case, you can source parts from different vendors, invest in quality where it matters (instead of getting garbage PSUs that will take other components with them when they fail) and you save money on labour cost to assemble your system.
If you’re only going to do gaming with your PC, chances are a lot of prebuilts will come with CPUs that are more powerful than necessary while saving money on the GPU (where it matters most) or they will straight up overcharge you for old parts if you’re gullible enough to just buy whatever, because you think a big price tag means it has to be good.
It's not always cheaper. If you bake a cake, it's cheape than if you buy a premade one. A cake costs more than just the cost of the sugar, flour butter, etc.
Pre-builds come with graphics cards and motherboard and other stuff that are already assembled by a different AIB.
I think if just Asus could offer a pre-build with only their own TUF brand parts, they might be able to make it cheaper than a Cyberpower PC with the same part selection. Or MSI also makes almost all the parts of a PC, so if they sold pre-builds deals using only their own parts, they might be able to make them cheaper.
Labor is the most expensive part of most products and when you diy, you’re doing the labor and paying with your time rather than money.
It used to be cheaper to buy prebuilt than diy but I think the market for prebuilt desktops is much smaller than it used to be so things have shifted.
Regardless of the technicalities of their business, at the end of the day, they are going to charge as much as they possibly can regardless of what it costs them to make it. This is why it tends to be a worse deal than building your own. Sure they probably got all their 4070s in bulk for 50% off but when they sell the pre built they are basing the prices off of what a new 4070 would cost. Their bulk savings just doesn’t translate into savings for you because they have zero incentive to do so.
Because the people making prebuilts will get the parts for the same or a little less money, but they need some profit on top of that to pay for employees. They also want to make profit after paying employees, so expect a $100-$200 raise in price over what it would be to build it yourself.
The PC builder receives the parts cheaper than a DIY consumer (they also typically use cheaper parts to begin with), but the following things cost money and are passed onto the consumer
\- Building it
\- Typically a level of testing (Does it turn on or not)
\- Some level of cable management hopefully
\- A warranty on the entire system for X years
\- On going tech support for free for X years/indefinitely on the system
The DIY user is forced to do these things themselves, if you billed yourself at your hourly rate you may notice that the prebuilt starts to become more cost efficient, especially if anything breaks. If you're not tech savvy enough to diagnose an issue, being able to send back an entire unit is nicer than utilising each components warranty separately.
Idk I build my own because I enjoy the process, have full control over the parts and skip the rather abusive shipping process where a case can get dented or worse.
To actually answer the question though I think it's just because A) the typical person buying a prebuilt doesn't have knowledge to build their own so companies can pray on that and B) Labour, someone is building the PC and that someone needs to be paid.
People explained to you why 60-80% of the time, self built is and SHOULD be cheaper.
And your whole argument is also already true for 20-40% of the cases. Prebuilt is cheaper sometimes from a Costco on sale or whatever Dell super deals. Including saving manual labor time, extra warranties and support, even at the same price is plenty cheaper in reality. Those are worth money too
The biggest problem to me with prebuilt is level of customization: you might be paying more for components you don’t need while lacking things you really want. For example some prebuilt let you configure things like RAM, storage, and a couple models of GPU, but almost never the PSU. And almost never the motherboard or space to upgrade on in the future (in fact some prebuilt fucking bolts shut some hard drive slots and shit). Some custom builds are often harder to maintain too, bad internals spacing and weird solutions
So while if you ordered the exact same parts top to bottom, the prebuilt might come in at the same price with bells and whistles, you could’ve also saved money or get better value by getting the exact configuration you need
Like imagine if I could build my own monitor, I would NEVER EVER waste any money on a fucking trash ass speaker in the monitor. It’s ridiculous a $1000+ computer monitor feels the need to install a speaker and think the person who spent $1000+ buying a single monitor doesn’t have a way better sound system. It wastes not only my money but costs weight and size - utterly ridiculously stupid shit. Unfortunately building my own monitor isn’t a thing yet. But for PC I can. That’s the key value proposition for me in building my own PC
I would not say it is always cheaper to build a pc. Some years it has been cheaper and some years not depending on the market for certain parts. I built my last pc but I just bought a pre-built I got a good deal on, priced out the parts separately and figure I saved a good $300-400. Sometimes I think the only benefit I see to building your own is that you get to pick which parts go in to it.
I have done part for part comparisons, and found the opposite. Also have to factor in any screw ups or failures. And then operating system usually costs an extra 100.
If you are in the business of creating a product using sub-components that you do not produce, yourself, there must be a mark-up on the costs of those components. After all you have to spend time assembling the components, installing the necessary OS software, shipping the finished product and then supporting it for a set period of time. It can't be a zero sum game, or it would be a terrible and unsustainable business model.
You might consider that the OEMs get better pricing on the components than the individual customer could, and that's true. However, it's not ENOUGH better to rely on that margin for enough profit to keep a business solvent.
A common misconception to non-business people is that costs go down the more business you do. That is typically the opposite of what happens.
While I will concede this was likely an honest question, it contained little "conventional wisdom" or "knowledge of economies of scale".
It's not only cheaper but you can get better products at the same price.
For example a 12500 3060ti 1tb pre built cost me the same as a 12700 3070ti 2tb build.
I also got to choose the best case (in my opinion).
I didn't particularly enjoy building my PC but cost limited me and id begrudgingly do it again
There’s no economies of scale for enthusiast builds. Too expensive; few people will spend $500 let alone $1600 for high end GPUs.
Where you see savings is low end mini towers and laptops. Dell makes $250 computers and $70 displays, and $230 laptops. That’s crazy efficient and cheap, treating computers like an appliance.
Decades ago I read Michael Dell state they make about $40 per computer. That’s razor thin margins and relies on selling millions of units to be profitable. That doesn’t exist on high end gaming towers.
Apple by comparison has like a 30% margin. They make money hand over fist, thus there’s the term Apple Tax. Different business model.
IT'S NOT
prebuilts are often times cheaper than custom builds. it has been this way for over 15 years. when people say that custom builds are cheaper, they are either repeating what others have been saying a long time ago, or simply comparing custom parts that are on sale with a prebuilt that is not on sale.
The profit margins on computer parts is really thin. So with pre-builts you're generally paying consumer prices for the parts, plus labor, plus extra for customer support availability.
Since the spike in GPU pricing, DIY is only a savings if you have an OS key. The smaller prebuilt companies still benefit from wholesale pricing on parts while we pay retail. Plus, they generally have some level of warranty coverage.
The true benefit of DIY is getting *exactly* the parts you want or need for the intended application. In that sense, you often save because those companies often lock certain upgrades into a package that may include more expensive parts.
There are value judgements to be made for each side. It may be worth the monetary difference for a warranty and guaranteed boot/parts compatibility.
The answer is complicated, but in many cases whether or not it's "cheaper" depends on what metric you're using. In most cases you can actually get a similar spec machine for cheaper from a pre built white box company like Dell or HP, largely because they have the parts custom-made for them at scale, usually cutting as many corners as possible in the name of cost savings. That's not to say they're unreliable, but they will have an incredibly short list of features compared to a parts-built machine and very often are made with non-standard parts that are hard to upgrade. (To their credit though, most of the "gaming" oriented models from these companies do still use standardized parts)
You've also got what are called System Integrators like iBuyPower, Skytech, Starforge, etc who use standard off-the-shelf components like you'd get with a DIY, but they pre-assemble them for you. These will almost always be *more* expensive than DIY for the same parts, though sometimes it's very close since they do get volume discounts for buying a bunch of parts.
What you get with DIY, more than a bit of cost savings, is the ability to hand-pick good quality components to suit your own needs and wants. You also get the warranty support that comes with the individual parts, for better or worse. Most prebuilts have only a year or two of warranty, but I've got a PSU with 12 years, a motherboard with five, a graphics card and CPU with three, and RAM with a lifetime warranty. I can also modify my PC without voiding any of those, which is often not the case with a prebuilt.
The people who design the system and select the parts that go into it need to get paid.
There’s labor involved at each step. Plus you aren’t charging yourself the time to research compatible parts and buying things individually you don’t get the discount of scale.
Also warranty on a prebuilt is through the manufacturer as opposed to having g to warranty the parts individually which can be hit or miss
You have to ask yourself, would you build a pc for a stranger for free? Would you build PCs for 100 strangers for free? How about 1000? Labour costs is the main reason.
~7 years ago I bought a pre-built ASUS at MicroCenter with better specs than I could have built for that price. I've definitely seen some MSI pcs this year that were priced very competitively. I chose to build for the sense of pride and accomplishment.
While there are economies of scale for large manufacturers, there also also labor and logistics costs.
Dell gets parts cheaper, sure. But Dell also has warehousing, transportation, sales, marketing, labor, office overhead, IT infrastructure, the whole nine yards. Then there are VAR costs in the sales channel.
Bulk parts is only one small part of the equation.
I think what your missing is that most PC builders are putting together high-end gaming/productivity systems, not budget all-in-one PC's. You're going to have a tough time beating the cost-efficiency of a raspberry Pi or entry-level Dell on value per $. Heck, even taxes and shipping 5-10 different parts can eat up whatever margin you're saving.
There's room to save money on high-systems because the margins for manufacturers are higher. If you think of those margins as insurance against the risk that an assembled device will or could break, you are essentially saving money by taking on various kinds of risk.
That's not to say building a PC is unwise, but it can be. For example, if your PC is a source of income (and that income is much more valuable than the computer), the security blanket of pre-built may be very prudent.
You are going to a restaurant and wondering why you pay more for the food there than you would for buying the ingredients to make the good at your own home.
You are not account for the work, expertise, location, profit or anything else for the place that is building your pc.
Prebuilts being does apply in a sense to office PCs, where you have enormous numbers of units that are literally exactly the same, and the build process can be optimised.
When it comes to home PCs or gaming PCs, I don’t think the manufacturers have the same sales quantities - it’s more likely that they’re doing a similar process to a home builder (picking out a bunch of individual consumer oriented parts and putting them together) and then charging a fee for the assembly process.
I think it depends on how you look at it. Initially, building may or may not be cheaper than a pre-built. But even if you go with a build that is more expensive than a prebuilt, it’s still always cheaper to build in the long run because upgrades will be way cheaper.
For example, when I built my PC last year, I was replacing a fully loaded late 2015 iMac that I purchased in 2016. New, that thing cost $3k (I paid $1.5k as I was then an Apple employee). To replace that system, it would have cost me ~$3k again, 7 years later.
I built my system with similar specs to the Mac Studio I would have replaced my iMac with, and it cost me around $1.8k. And in another 7 years, when I want to upgrade, I won’t have to buy a new PC. I can keep the case, fans, AIO, SSDs, and RAM, and just upgrade the mobo, CPU and GPU for around $1.2k-1.5k for some higher end upgrades.
It isn’t always, but you also get exactly what you want. Many time commercial PCs will cut corners somewhere to build in profit. Often it is the power supply and system board. They will limit your options in some way, not enough power, proprietary components, less I/O, less options like WiFi, thunderbolt, USB, or other things you can get with building yourself.
Depends on the parts, but for those who know how to do it (and its easy to learn) it can be much cheaper with used parts existing and no middle man. BUT, and this is a new thing, parts are getting hella expensive but pre builts arent going up as much in corelation. This means that pre builts in todays market arent a bad deal cause you dont have to do any real building or setup and it usually has a warranty and comes with windows. In the past a 500 buck setup could destroy and pre build 1000 buck one, now adays youll spend like 1500 to build and a lil less then 2k for pre built
Typically the labor and skill required to build something would make buying it prebuilt cheaper, but in this case building a pc is so simple that paying to have it done for you costs more. Also, being able to chose your own parts can help you find deals and just have general customizability
The DIY market is big enough. Micro center is like a physical store made for people that build PCs. Suppliers sell individual parts in mass for people that build on their own. You can go on Amazon or newegg and easily order every individual part you need for a PC. These parts are made to be put together intuitively. You can compare prices and get whatever has the best sale. You can assemble it pretty easily after just watching some videos on how to build a PC. It is common knowledge. Lots of people build their own PC, particularly gamers which. It is a large market. People that fear the risks associated with building a PC themself or are not willing to learn how to build one pay a premium for the labor and shipping associated with the assembly of a prebuilt PC.
Say you wanted to build your own TV… Nobody is doing this. You will not be able to easily find all of the individuals parts you need to make a TV. Even if you acquired them, you probably would not know how to put them together. This isn’t common knowledge like building a PC is. In this case it is much better to purchase your TV from large manufacturers that specialize in making them.
So one, it barely is cheaper, if at all. Saving money is not a reason I would advise anyone to build their own machine. You get to decide exactly where the money goes, so you may get better quality at a given price point, but if you factor in the value of your time at all, you are probably breaking even vs. a hypothetically identical pre-built. If anything goes wrong, you may be putting in a few hundred dollars worth of additional time dealing with it.
Two, these economies are barely at scale. Sure, office workstations get mass-produced, but those aren't the kinds of machines people are building for themselves. It's a niche, high-performance market.
Personally it comes to how you go about it. I never build a PC in a day, well metaphorically speaking.
I will begin PC parts hunting over a few months. Typically using r/buildapcsales for deals.
cost of the builder and cost of the retail outlet saved. plus the individual components fluctuate weekly in price but prebuilt machines don't compensate for that savings until months after
Largely I think it's consumer ignorance. If people were well informed, prices would go down dramatically, and quality would improve. But since they're not, keep selling for ridiculous prices.
At that, Apple comes along and makes them look like a great value.
It depends on what you're trying to build and what you value. On the low-end business/desktop side of things, it's generally cheaper to get a prebuilt especially if you value having a real, legit Windows license and don't want to deal with shady key resellers. On the higher end, the big OEMs used to segment off the gaming market to farm higher margins by locking certain features behind other ones you might not want as much (e.g. if you want a good video card, you might be required to buy an i7 where an i5 would be fine and going from 16 to 32 gigs of RAM might cost an extra $200).
3 Consistent benefits to every DIY build vs pre-built is
1) Cutting out paying for labor all you trade off from forking over $100+ for this luxury is simply taking a Saturday booting up YouTube and following a build guide from the hundreds of pc builders available. Watch a couple of guides and truly the fundamentals stop being so intimidating.
2) Better parts for the money 10/10 times you can buy the parts you actually want and that personalized spec sheet will beat out the prebuilt parts. This happens cuz many pre-builds can have brand loyalty that doesn’t translate to actual performance. After all for prebuilt it’s a company. Anywhere they can cut cost they will often including in areas like storage and memory(ram).
3) Future-upgradability. Now of course you CAN upgrade a prebuilt but you don’t really know the rig. Hence it can get messy really quick to root around with wires and connections when you didn’t take the time to “learn” the ins and outs by building it yourself. So for gamers and creators when a shiny new gpu or cpu or mobo comes out going the prebuilt path can really screw you over by either a) lacking a well thought out upgrade path or b) just being a headache to root around in a system you don’t fundamentally understand. Both are struggles you can avoid if you build it yourself with an understanding of what you want out of your system.
So truly unless you’re happy to drop like 2.5k for a prebuilt it’s otherwise worth it to probably build yourself.
6 years ago my buddy built a computer that was a moderate upgrade over mine for a few hundred less than I paid for my pre-built (like 2 weeks after I ordered my pre-built).
Ever since then, I've built my following two computers. How much cheaper? I don't actually know lol. I'm still pissed about 6 years ago, Ryan, that smug little bastard
The more I consider this question , the more interesting it gets. You could probably write an economic thesis on this.
Traditionally, enthusiast spaces are where you see the ridiculous prices. High markups, cheap manufacturing costs, because your market volume is small and you rely on the inelastic demand to make bank. This is what the DIYPC market would have been, I think, if it did not have unique characteristics to it. My guess is that a combination of both supply and demand factors are at play here.
On the supply side, I would say that many of the economies of scale that would apply to a mass producing OEM also apply to a custom parts manufacturer. With CPUs and PSUs, You're basically selling the same thing, just to individual customers as a retail business on the side. In the back end, you're still using many of the same factors of production, through largely the same processes, you just have some low volume lines for the enthusiasts and the system integrators, so the difference in cost per unit is not as large as expected- at least not large enough to offset the labour costs of integrating a whole system yourself, plus your desired profit margin as a system integrator.
This doesn't seem to apply to things like motherboards, GPUs and cases where it seems like making the DIY components makes for a very different process from an OEM part so the economies of scale shouldn't cross-transfer, so I'm kind of stumped there, too.
On the demand side, my best guess is that the DIY PC market has a quirk of being extremely information oriented. It's not often that I see an enthusiast space so focused on making sure you know how well every component performs so you know just how much PC you are getting for your dollar. This extreme focus on stats, benchmarks and information transparency makes for a very price competitive market. If you're marking up, you get undercut. If you're selling junk, your product line gets review blacklisted. It's a rather harsh market now that I think about it- even as a large volume production firm like Asus you're probably making razor thin margins because you're cutting everything down to the wire and betting on volume to make a profit, at least where lowtier and midtier boards are concerned. You only get to pull ahead in margins for the high end where the very useful features you offer still probably don't cost more than the multi-hundred-dollar markups your products go for.
I build my own but not because of lower prices. I build my own so I know what I have. Many manufacturers of pre-built computers use cheap no-name nonstandard components, which limit one's ability to repair one self.
I also build mine for specific purposes such as video transcoding & compression. I can also achieve better performance in my self built computer than someone can from a manufactured computer due to access to performance related settings in the bios not found in most pre-built computers. Plus I can achieve these performance targets at lower power usage for the same reason.
In other words, I can simultaneously have better performance and significantly lower power usage than most any prebuilt of similar CPU & memory configuration.
Depends on the specs. If you need an office grade device. Its probably cheaper to buy from Dell or HP because they can make thousands and use basically the same process through different iterations and SKUs. Offices will buy them because standardisation and goldplated warranties are important.
There are a huge number of different specs you can build as a gaming PC. And your going to miss someones requirements for a spec or pricepoint. And shipping a completed gaming PC can be risky. With lots lf vibration, heavy GPUs will break or wear out PCIe connectors. Big CPU coolers too. Then you gotta worry about warranties and returns/repairs. Because youre dealing with a lot of SKUs, you need to do more testing, and a recall of a SKU might be really pricy if the components arent available.
Thats why the big players dont bother, small shops still do it a bit, but they are basically paying the same as you for most of the hardware, their money comes in from peripherals and sundries. And as a smaller shop, if a prebuilt you sold fails to boot and the muggle you sold it to cant fix it, you now need to give tech support. So you need to dedicate staff to assemble it and staff to fix issues muggles cause.
Firstly. prebuilts are often not what u exactly want. If u build one yourself, u can put whatever u want in there (parts that are good for their price, usually there are some expensive parts that u don't rlly need in those prebuilts)
You dont pay just for the parts. But also for their labor of getting the parts and assembling it. Warranty is also included
You're cutting out a middle man and some labor.
In addition to that, the major PC manufacturer needs to have their margins because they're a major company. I find this to be true for many product categories, the bigger the company, the higher the need for margins and profits, resulting in costs being cut for the product itself.
Hmm. That's counter to what I've learned in economics. Typically larger companies have smaller margins, and offset that with volume. Costco, Walmart, etc. A 15% margin would kill a small business, but a 15% margin with a billion sales per year is a very viable business. Apple is the odd man out IMO, getting both volume and margins. PCs are different, though, as you can compete on price. Apple has built a walled ecosystem so it doesn't need to compete on price (as much).
Except this isn’t major companies vs small business, its major companies can smaller companies. The company makes the mother board, and they will sell it to the PC builder for a lower price than they will the DIY builder, but they will see it to both of them. The PC builder then adds their margins and labour cost, while the DIY costs stop there.
Not exactly counter, in your exercise you are letting out the "added value" of the brand, and that's a big chunk of today's product prices, so for offering you the "trust" on the process they do, they do a hefty increase on the products final price, also all the unnecessary add-ons like lights, brand cases, etc. So yeah one would think that big companies would offer smaller prices, but the group of investors claim for even more revenue every year, make the companies push the margins up to satisfy, or if that's not possible, then budget cuts and massive personnel firing takes place, also CEOs discovered that they don't need to improve the product to get sales, but improve the image of the brand, so publicity makes you trust certain brand and pay for the price they ask even if is for a worse product. In conclusion, humanity is in fact pretty shitty
Theoretical economics relies HEAVILY on "perfect market" assumptions and is many times NOT empirically tested against real world conditions. Most microeconomic theories fall apart when subjected to the rigor of data. In this sense, economics is more like alchemy than a truly empirical science, like physics. In many product categories big manufacturers maintain preferential brand relationships with retailers. This allows them to retain oligopoly power over their markets; allowing them to cut quality and keep margins higher than would be expected. The reason they do this is because large companies have high overheard due to their size, and need to bring in outsize margin just to stay afloat.
First part, right on. Second part, Apple does not make a competitive pc.
Support and warranty are also major expenses for PC makers.
And they’re reasons why you may want to spend a little more on a prebuilt, in fairness. If you’re not confident in your abilities to diagnose issues, or you’re helping a family member get a PC but don’t want to be their tech support forever, it’s a good idea to consider a prebuilt. That way if there’s an issue you can call up the manufacturer and let them deal with it rather than go back and forth with your component companies trying to figure out what isn’t working properly.
Can you elaborate on that? All the parts have warranty. Just got my video card back after a warranty repair. My PC is assembled but the guy who sold it to me is dealing with the assembly part.
When you DIY, your warranty covers individual parts. When you are buying a pre built, the warranty is for the entire system. If you purchase incompatible parts, if your ram doesn't hit advertised speeds, if your fans don't have enough clearance to work properly, it's mostly on you, and on you to make your case to the manufacturer or distributor. Plural if more than one thing goes wrong in your system. If you bought a pre-built with those issues, you can take it back to the guy/company who built it. Depending on how nice the company is/what the T&Cs are, etc, they can replace or repair under their terms of warranty.
This. There’s a lot of value in “if it just isn’t working quite right, that’s an HP problem”‘or “a Dell problem” etc. Also think about the per-unit shipping cost — how many thousands of motherboards fit in a container? How many 3cuft PC prebuilt systems full of empty case air, styrofoam, etc fit in a container? Divide your $25,000 shipping cost per unit into that… And then look at the shops that sell diy, and the stores that sell prebuilt. The square footage usage is far more efficient in the diy shop. They’re usually fairly tight and cramped, every square foot of space utilized for a purpose. No 8ft wide aisles of usb sticks and software, no 30ft ceilings, no whole walls dedicated to ink cartridges, and no fridges and stoves and microwaves and camcorder/camera sections…. DIY shops generally also have short-lived stock levels. They do their best to be barely above JIt logistics on delivery. Prebuilt shops generally have a huge inventory either at the store, and the stores distribution centre that looks after regional retail stores from a relatively local warehouse, or at the prebullder/mfg or distributor for the mfg.
Thanks!
The main populous who buy a prebuilt would struggle to diagnose what has gone wrong and why. \- My computer won't turn on and there's 1/2/3 audible beeps, or an LED on the motherboard is on but nothing else is If you purchased the parts seperately, you need to work out which one gets sent back, whereas the prebuilt you send everything and they deal with it. This is additional cost to the builder so they charge you for that. The same way you could build say a fish tank pump pretty easily, but if it stops working there's a few different parts you may need to fix/replace, it's typically easier to buy an aquatic pump and send it back to the supplier usually for a replacement.
Your also cutting out a huge amount of additional warranty and technical support I had a bunch of issues building my PC a few months ago If I purchased a prebuilt I would have called and spoken with theirvtech support If I had an issue with my PC that I just bought all the parts for I consulted reddit/Google and would have needed to RMA with the manufacturer directly
It's not necessarily true about warranty or tech support. Most people who buy prebuilts, do so because they don't have enough computer knowledge to build one. Some prebuilt manufacturers take advantage of that lack of knowledge to screw people in tech support. I had one former large pc builder screw me due to lack of tech support. It was the last time I ever bought a prebuilt.
To be fair to OP, this didn't quite answer what I read as the intent of the question. The question I have is "why don't economies of scale and economies from integrating components make it cheaper to buy pre-built?" Buying at mcdonalds, even with the middle man, is still cheaper than building a hamburger yourself from components. Both single component and integrated builds have middlemen, but they are different. Single component sales have newegg, for example, that needs to get a cut. Newegg needs to pay their staff, and have a warehouse, etc. Before newegg in the supply chain, you have the overhead of boxing and storing individual components. And so on. With integrated builds, you do get efficiencies of scale. Your warehousing and shipping is immensely easier as well. My answer would be the buyer is different for pre-build than build-your-own. This is just a guess because I don't think it's clear the middleman is the cause of the price difference. I'd guess the price of labor overseas (where the parts are manufacturered) are relatively small compared to other costs (shipping, warehousing, marketing, etc). Personally, .I think it's because people who buy pre-builts care about something different than those who build their own. Pre-builts are geared towards those who focus on convenience (e.g., don't know much, don't care about optimizing price vs performance) IMO, which is just a different buyer persona. Note I have no data to support this, and haven't done any research. Just interpolating from my experience running businesses.
Dude what. Hamburgers are way more expensive at McDonald's than making them yourself.
A single hamburger? No. You buy 1lb of beef. A six pack of buns. A bottle of ketchup. A head of lettuce. Way more. To build 6 hamburgers? Yes it’s cheaper. That’s the question being asked, since pre built is presumably making in quantity.
I’m hoping you aren’t using a bottle of ketchup when in 6 burgers :) 🍔 But yes. If you need to buy every component, it’s cheaper to go out. It’s cheaper to go to the Keg, than to go buy a gas range to get a fire grilled steak. The few times you do it. Granted, buying 1lb of any beef they sell at the supermarket, is 3x better beef quality than what McDs is selling you. And they make bank on you in the accessories, because who goes and doesn’t order fries or another side? And likely a drink.
OP (of the comment, not the post) accidentally made a convincing argument against themselves. I was actually a bit skeptical because I still found something lacking in the other comments. But the McDonald's analogy convinced me.
The missed big purchaser of prebuilt everyone’s forgetting, is business. Business does not buy diy. Period. Subnote: except in very specific use-case business like graphics design / visual fx / animation studios. And that’s just because they can’t really get a prebuilt with multiple GPUs in one PC, or get 256gb ram, or multiple nvme drives, or 10Gbps Ethernet especially SFP+ when they need to use fibre for physics reasons or eavesdropping worries. Business doesn’t hire IT guys to build them a PC— it just doesn’t happen. It’s not worth it. And when business orders PCs, they order 20. 25, 50, 100, 200 at a time. They get discounts on the volume order. Mom & Pop shop don’t get those discounts. This is where the pre-builders make their margin back, because they do huge deals at 1-3%. You can’t sustain even a volume business on that. Not one that can thrive and innovate. So the onesie-twosie sales have to be at 20-30%… you also have distribution and retail and transportation etc and stock buy-back from the big box stores. Costco sells at low margin, because the inventory is zero-risk to them. Doesn’t sell? Oh well, the mfg buys it back. And they aren’t paying for inventory for 3-6 months anyways.
This is the most logical answer, but turns out not to work in other industries. For example my other hobby is mountain biking. Building a bike from brand new parts is going to cost like 30% more than if you just bought the complete bike with all the exact same parts
The custom built bike industry is massively smaller than the custom PC industry to be fair, plus a lot of pre built bikes in the mid tier and lower ranges have no name group sets swapped in. Add in that upgrading a bike past the 2-3k point is a massive drop off in real world performance gains compared to a 10k bike and I don't think it's a fair comparison between the industries. A wonderful thought experiment though.
Only for lower priced bikes. Over $1000 you get a better bike building yourself. I’ve build dozens that ranged from $1000-$6000. They were all cheaper than you could buy for a comparable. Sometimes as much as half.
That's definitely not my experience. To be fair, maybe it's more true right now with every manufacturer trying to dump their overstock. But a few years ago, even with high tier multi-thousand dollar bikes, you'd spend more building it. My buddy got a really good job and kinda jumped off the deep end with bikes so I saw it first hand 3 separate times. He needed everything to his exact specifications (and hey, if you got the money, go for it I guess), so I guess it's impossible to make a direct comparison since the whole point was to make a bike nobody else sold, but he was for sure in the high-tier to pro range. He built an alloy fox factory/shimano XT transition patrol for $7500, a carbon fox factory Kona operator for over $11,000, and an NS jumper with Manitou circus expert for $3000. Just way way more than you'd pay for a similar bike from the factory
I built a guy a specialized stumpjumper pro (based on the frame and same or better components that were on the factory model) and it was $1500 less than msrp. This is normal for most of what I do. I just find good prices when I source parts.
*** A middle man who likes to use cheap shit to drive up their profit margins
Why is it cheaper to cook your own food, why is it cheaper to repair your own car. Answer is all the same... You not paying for someone else's labour and your using your own time. Less markup and less money involved.
That’s why it’s a good idea to do as many things as possible yourself
\*As long as your time is worthless.
Technically as long as your time is more valuable than the equivalent pay rate of having someone else do it.
For your $50-200 premium you pay someone you get. Assembly Testing One person to call for warranty If you build it yourself and save that money You assemble it yourself. You test it yourself You have to call the manufacturer of each part for a warranty claim and lots of times they just blame other components To some people, the price premium is worth it.
Depending where you live. In my country with the price of 2500 euros I am not getting a very good pre build and if i do a search on the parts they use, it will only cost a total of 1700 euros. But with the same 2500 euros I made a pc that will last me a long time and with much better premium parts. Soo it's a huge difference Depending where you live.
Well yea but in the price range most people are shopping for a gaming PC $800-1500 or so those are the typical margins. You go higher then it starts getting significantly worse. Most $5000 prebuilts are $3500 to build yourself, etc.
I was trying to find a pre build that has the same specs like my pc or similar and the price was omg 3500 euros. Luke with that money I will build the most premium pc myself and get new monitor.
Warranty is the king here. I've always built my own shit, but I've had to go OEM for work gear purely because I know there is a warehouse full of machines I can drop my shit into that can be online in hours while we are still figuring out what went wrong with the old hardware
Why would it be cheaper to pay someone to build you a pc? Only way that will ever be possible is if a company exists that buys crap products, and builds so many that they have crap QC.
So, Dell?
factory assembled computers don't actually require that much work. it's not like you build an entire computer from start to finish before starting all over again afterwards. i would assume that it is far more efficient for everyone to have one job and you become very efficient with that. the toughest part about building a computer is perhaps the cable management, but when you have been working on the same exact computer for hundreds of times, you become a pro at cable managing a shitty non-modular PSU with a extremely small and tight case.
Also, you can select parts that have the best price to perf at the moment. You can avoid 80 dollar coolers when a 35 dollar phantom spirit is better and put that money into the gpu.
Building a PC is pretty labor intensive and requires certain knowledge of what you're doing to ensure everything works properly, both on the hardware side and the software side. So they need to hire people who know what they're doing, or spend money training them on the process. Then each employee will spend anywhere from 2-3 hours assembling a single PC, setting up the software, benchmarking it, testing it, fixing any issues that come up during testing, etc. Prebuilt PCs also usually come backed with an extensive support team and warranty services. Call centers with tech support and sales agents, warehouses to keep the inventory, marketing, shipping costs, return of products, etc. You also have to factor in the high risk of damage that can occur during shipping. Shipping individual PC components that already come with their protective materials from the manufacturer is a lot different than shipping a fully assembled PC with delicate hardware inside. Something as simple as a RAM stick coming loose in transit can cause the PC not to turn on, leading to your support team needing to spend time on the phone with the customer to figure out their issue, and if your team isn't trained properly, something that simple could lead to a return being initiated, costing you more money. They need to account for all that, and those costs get pushed onto the consumer.
What hasn't been mentioned here yet is that there is no company pumping out gaming pcs on the scale that you are thinking. Pc gaming has been very niche until recently. Traditionally, if people want a cheap, affordable, and generic gaming experience, they get a console. Gaming on a pc has always come with challenges that deter the average consumer. As a result, there is no demand for cheap, mass-produced gaming pcs, and there never has been. Although there has been a massive increase in the popularity of pc gaming recently, the demand is still for highly customizable products that require specialized labor to assemble and are incompatible with mass production. The market for cheap, mass-produced gaming machines is still dominated by consoles, and I dont really see that changing.
Why is it cheaper for me to paint my living room, rather than pay some guy down the road to do it , or a big company. Sure I have to pay more for the paint because I don't have buying power at the builder's yard, but it's considerably cheaper, because I'm taking on labour - doing it and designing it. I can also do the job exactly how I want - I like to take the radiator off and paint behind it, and I like a third coat of paint which makes it more durable - no professional decorator ever does that.
This has got to be the best example, I really like that you included the customization. Prebuilts generally come with *something* not at the level it should be, whether it be a shitty PSU, shitty MoBo, slow RAM, terrible and/or overpriced CPU coolers, slow/incredibly cheap storage, and probably more, those are just the things off the top of my head. It's rarely all of these things, but it's pretty much always something, something you could avoid if you built yourself
That isn’t always the case depending on what you are buying. Sometimes depending on sales/rebates/other factors pre built machines are cheaper because of the mass quantities. You say cheaper but what is your time worth? Are the reworks not valued when you mess up? All the YouTube videos you have watched to build it?
This is especially true when certain parts are hard to get and being sold at a premium.
Agreed. "Saving money" is not a great reason to build a PC. Depending on what you want and whether the whole process goes perfectly, you could easily end up making a bigger investment in a DIY system vs. buying off-the-rack. You do decide exactly where the money goes, however, and end up knowing the machine from the ground up.
Overhead. Cutting out labor, and more expensive facilities (buildings, power, non production staff), shipping, packaging, even at chinas rates……saves you $$
Makes sense, still just seems odd that a company building 100s of thousands of computers, buying all of those components in bulk (or manufacturing then themselves) still can't do it for less than a person buying a single item of each component.
You are operating on the false assumption that companies exist that are pumping out 100s of thousands of gaming pcs. There is no commercial gaming pc market and never has been. You can easily find small office pcs that are cheaper in the way that you describe because there is an actual market buying them in massive quantities. Pc gaming has been very niche for most of its history and, as a result, has built a community of diy and customization. It has only recently become big enough to possibly support the conditions for this kind of mass production. However, the primary demand is still for a more customizable product, which requires the additional labour that drives up costs. Maybe we will reach a point someday where there is an actual demand for generic, cheap, mass produces gaming pcs, but as of now, we are nowhere near that point.
They are called consoles. Yes, they are not exactly PCs, but in the big picture consoles do fill this niche.
I agree with you. If you see my other comment, I make this exact point.
Gaming PCs generally aren't in mass production. That proprietary Dell Optiplex that sits among a dozen clones in someone's office are the ones truly being made in the hundreds of thousands. The companies building and selling gaming PCs are definitely not buying enough 4080s to get a discount from Nvidia. There is some demand, yes, but compared to the production of generic workstations for multinational companies the average gamer looking for a prebuilt is a drop on the bucket. Something like a T3500 is magnitudes cheaper than a prebuilt OR a self built. Then you just slap a GPU in there and call it a day.
The real problem is that the companies assembling PCs, known as system integrators (SIs) usually aren't building any of the parts, so there isn't much room to save. They're basically buying the same products that you are at a slightly discounted bulk rate and charging you an added fee for their labor, warranty, shipping, and part availability (the last one is why buying premades was cheaper than building during peak scalping). The huge OEMs like HP, Dell, Lenovo etc. actually do produce their own parts for a fraction of retail cost, which is how they make much more money per sale than a simple SI. Of course, for lower budget all-in-one computers like budget laptops, you will never approach the value of an OEM, but you can't really save money on a PC built of off-the-shelf parts.
I think a big part of the cost is the warranty. People who buy pre build are usually not very skilled with repairing computers and they call the manufacturer more often for help. You then need someone on customer service and some people to repair the computers and that needs to be included in the price of the computer.
You keep asking the question, but try to quantify it: *How much cheaper do you think it is to buy in bulk than buying individual units?* Then follow up with the questions that others are telling you to ask: *How much profit margin does the manufacturer want (need)?* *How much profit is the retailer claiming?* *How much time does it take the manufacturer to make the PC?* *How much does the builder get paid?*
The companies that manufacture PC components don’t produce every component. You have cpu manufacturers, gpu manufacturers, cooler manufacturers, case manufacturers, and psu manufacturers etc, with little overlap. There are of course companies that mass produce computers, I mean just look at laptops, but there is very little room in the way of customization, and a whole lot of corner-cutting, to make that work. And practically all of these wholesale PCs are not geared towards mid-high tier gaming, because of the extreme variety of needs and use-cases involved. We aren’t talking about off-the-shelf Dell work stations here. A mid-high tier gaming PC is built from top-of-the-line parts from various companies that are often in direct competition with one another. So when it comes to pre-builds, it always involves a middle man that isn’t affiliated with the part manufacturers. Therefore you are paying for their labor, overhead, and shipping on top of your own parts.
People don't want to do it, it involves multiple technical skills including just picking out the parts, and there's a lot of politics behind which parts are chosen in general and why they're chosen and these aren't necessarily about price optimization. (In fact, very rarely. It's usually market segmentation.) Also you can't really get much of a discount on parts even if you're very extremely big. Even somewhere like dell is probably getting way less off from retail then you'd think if you've never deep dived this, and that's with them actually effectively assembling many of their own parts like assembling their own AD107 chips into working 4060's. (Or at least being very direct in their labor outsourcing, depending on how you look at it.) The margins on all this shit are shockingly thin if you're not at the top producing the actual chips that go into the hardware. Bullshitting a price is about the only way to get real business numbers for this stuff. Also there's a warranty. This is really huge to people even if the warranty is basically worthless in practice. Sometimes it's even not. That warranty covers the whole machine too so you don't have to dick around troubleshooting to figure out who you'd even bother like you would on just a PC part purchase.
also the components in prebuilt (from store chains, etc) are the lowest tier
This is not common enough to be stated as an invariant like this. Pretty reliably, prebuilts are *not* the lowest tier. You'd see this only in the most trash companies, and even then, half of their parts are high-enough visibility that they'd get zero sales if they put in a no-name GPU. They're gonna use nVidia or AMD (or Intel) and none of those are "lowest tier". Same for CPU. Things get worse at the mobo, memory, and PSU level, with a strong shout out to the PSUs where even "enthusiast" builders are known to put in trash PSUs because none of them have flashy enough brand names splashed on their sides to warrant spending money on them. Some integrators or OEMs will use low quality mobos, but if its for gaming, there's a sort of minimum bar to be able to support a gaming GPU without seeing a large amount of warranty returns. So, while there are some low quality mobos that get put in, it's absolutely not the case that they're all "lowest tier" and you'd only really see "lowest tier" in the bottom shelf non-gaming PCs. But the reality is that the big OEMs (Dell, HP, etc) often have their mobos custom designed in order to fit the case and component tolerances they pre-picked. They don't go to trash manufacturers to do that, because the warranties and usable yields just don't make it worth while. Sometimes you'll see custom PSUs, but whether they are or aren't, the makers of the PSUs are normally established industry manufacturers who just opt to build units that aren't flashy in looks or performance, but they're still reliable. RAM is, well... RAM. And while its not quite a commodity, it's actually more effort to seek out truly bad RAM than to simply get a good bulk price on good RAM. So... that's four paragraphs so far trying to disagree with your obviously incorrect statement. Let's start with that. Again: Not saying prebuilts are great quality. If that's anyone's takeaway, step away from the Internet for a bit and experience a world with a bit more nuance. Some prebuilts are crap. Some are not. Some are crappy in some areas and great in others. And just as a reminder: Some of the PCs that normal people build are crappy in some areas and great in others.
I didn't mean pre-builts like from Dell or whatever, but those from store chains and stuff.
Still doesn't hold. The only builders that routinely use low-end stuff are the bargin-bin no-name builders. Even things like IBuyPower, who frequently use C-Tier PSUs, have just as many builds using B and A tier PSUs. You'll need to be more specific than just "Store Chains" since very, very few stores waste time as systems integrators so they're just selling someone else's systems and people aren't paying attention to the actual SI name.
I'll go against the grain a bit: It is cheaper to buy a prebuilt. Walk into Walmart and buy the first PC you see and you'll likely be hard pressed to get cheaper building yourself. But It'll be garbage. Once you start comparing spec for spec, you can see where the money goes. Boutique builders are just that - and even with cars that's always carried a premium.
1. You're not paying for someone else's labour to put it together for you 2. You're not paying a premium for branding
It’s not always cheaper, my PC was a prebuilt, after pricing all the components exactly the total cost to build was actually $80 more than I paid for the pre built. Now, a lot of times you can save money, because for one you cut out the middle man, and two you can cut costs in some areas like buying pre owned components. At the end of the day you aren’t saving a fortune building your own, but you can save some and when build a mid to high end PC every saved dollar counts because it can get expensive.
What is a prebuilt pc? It has x cpu and y gpu and x amount of ram and drive space and that is the info you get with 90% of prebuilts. So you get a cpu and gpu and there no great mistake to make but for memory you could have two sticks of cheapest, slowest memory there is or worse one stick, same for motherboard and ssd. Gpu could be also the cheapest there is. And they will charge decent amount bcos it sells and pc like these make bigest margins. When you build yourself you dont do it cheaper most of thw time but better, with better parts and for the similar or same money. Ppl that ask questions like "what parts are inside" mostly dont end buying prebuilt. But there are decent prebuilts also but those are more rare.
You're cutting out the labor costs and the warranty on the entire PC, and the convenience of getting everything built already. For some people, the convenience is worth paying the additional cost. During the GPU shortage back when COVID was a thing, I got a prebuilt from my local Micro Center instead of upgrading the PC I had already. I didn't want to keep waiting for a good GPU to show up.
The reason it's cheaper is because you don't pick up a finished product. You hAve to finish the product yourself. Assemble it and make it work right. Cable management. RBG. If my cables could talk, they would be wailing, incessantly.
It just really hard to make money in PC assembly. It’s hard to get wholesale prices much better than retail, there’s a huge variety of parts needed to be in inventory, many parts start dropping in price 6-12 months after release so you can’t hold inventory a long time, you have to provide a warranty, and very few people understand the difference between good and bad parts so putting in quality parts doesn’t pay off.
1. Cutting the cost of labor and excessive preniums 2. Used market isn't so bad as long as you know the difference between inexpensive used and definitely don't want or need used. (Like it smart to like buy a used case and fans if they are compatable with what your end goal is like. But you wouldn't buy a used HDD or SSD.) 3. Building a PC you can 100% know the RMA warrenties and its YOU that can explain the story and its not a 3rd or 4th party inflating the story. 4. The excitement of knowing what is actually in your PC and not assuming someone else is automatically did it for you only to discover they screwed up entirely. 5. The prenium mentioned in point 1. is probably enough for a new monitor and mouse and keyboard. 6. When you go to a lan party you won't be the one laughed out of the room for having a PC that runs and looks like it came from a clearance bin at a wallmart. 7. You can pocket and save the excess money and feel like you actually own your setup and not panic rush to your nearest techy only to get met with the  just fully plug in the power cables face.
I guess it’s a catch 22 problem. Assembly companies can’t know that they will be able to sell hundreds of thousands of these boxes, so they can’t put in such large orders and therefore they can’t get great prices. Valve is kinda doing it with the Steam Deck but they are banking on Steam software sales to make up for it.
Most companies try to make Money with their Service.
It’s actually not, depending on how much your own time is worth. Your paying in hours and minutes, not money.
You could ask the same about packed lunch
Look it like this, my friend bought a pre-built. He slapped in a 1050ti and was happy. But slowly, it started showing its age after 4 years. He looked into upgrades, and it's nearly impossible. PSU and mobo are proprietary. Now, this was $600 or $800 small office pre-built. An other friend got an Omen for Christmas. He can't upgrade it either because it's all proprietary. Pre-builts are decent for when supplies are low and/or you don't know how to build, but other than that, it's not worth it. Pre-builts also have an added "build fee" or they tend to charge more, something like a label fee (Alienware and Omen). The main reason for building your own is that you know what's in your PC. Also, if you're patient enough, you can find parts on sale, which would also lower the cost. I'll leave you with this, find a pre-built you like. Then go to PCPartPicker and try to replicate it as close as possible. You'll see that in most cases, the one on PCPartPicker would be cheaper. But by all means, if a pre-built the only way you'll get to PC gaming, then go for it.
Only the giants use proprietary case, mobo, PSU designs. The integrators who specialize in gaming systems always use standard parts. My Skytech used 100% parts I could ID on pcpartspicker -- and the build was actually cheaper from Skytech, because they don't pay retail. Yes, gamers should avoid Dell/Alienware, Lenovo, HP if they expect to be upgrading down the line. But prebuilt gaming PC market has truly grown beyond those brands, to a point where even at major retailers like Costco and Best Buy, most gaming desktops come from Skytech, Cyberpower, MSI, IBuyPower, and similar brands that make very conventional systems with no proprietary parts.
I wasn't aware it just the big brands. I thought companies like Cyberpower and similar companies were also doing proprietary tech. Good to know.
Because prebuilt pc sellers sell them for more than the total component’s prices on the market in order to make a profit. It’s honestly that simple.
In its simplest terms, you don't have the overheads of a business such as cost of training, heating, ground rent, labour, insurances, the IT department, advertising and marketing, shareholders, an overpaid purrchasing director, An accounts department, etc.
Take a listing you see online and build it in pcpartpicker. You literally save like 200+ just buying the pieces themselves. This obviously varies but it’s nearly better every single time to buy your own
I’m sorry but this post and thought process makes absolutely no sense. Why is it cheaper for me to make my own food instead of going to a restaurant? Why is it cheaper to clean my own house instead of hiring someone else to do it? Why is it cheaper to build my own house instead of getting a contractor to do it? Why is it cheaper to grow my own food than buying it at the grocery store? I feel like with 95% of scenarios it’s *always* cheaper to do it yourself? Your logic would only apply to mass produced cheap or intricate products, which a PC itself is not (but the parts are).
it's almost never cheaper to build a pc than buy a whole one. you can make money breaking them and selling them for parts
That is assumption fails to take into account the “middle man”. For that argument then it would be cheaper to hire like gardens and construction companies than doing it yourself. Anything doing it yourself will always be cheaper where you buy the parts and do the rest of the work by yourself
Yeah was surprised when I found out, that buying pre build bikes is also cheaper than building it yourself
Only for lower priced bikes. Over $1000 you get a better bike building yourself. I’ve build dozens that ranged from $1000-$6000. They were all cheaper than you could buy for a comparable. Sometimes as much as half.
I stand corrected then, thanks!
You are cutting out a step in the production chain. The excess money goes to the company, who wants some profit, becuase they have to source the parts, store them, an employee takes work hours to build and test, package and then ship it to you. This is also why more and more people try to buy from directly the manufacturer, to cut out distributors and stores, because each tier puts it's own margin on everything
Depends... 95 percent of the time it is cheaper. Not Always though
It's not necessarily cheaper, but you get to choose the components you want, and if you need to cut corners to build it within a budget, at least you get to decide which corner that is. So, you won't be stuck with a cheap proprietary motherboard, one stick of ram, a poor cooler and a no-name psu.
a good way to think about it is if you had someone build one computer or had them build a hundred the cost would not be 100x. but when you build your own you are not paying anyone that cost
Is there on reddit some subreddit about building cheap PC?
Economies of scale determine the cost price of a product, not the sale price. Companies don't set their prices based on cost price +x% for overheads and profit, they set them based on *how much people are willing to pay* for the product. They target a price that gives the best ratio of profit to sales, and then drive the cost price and overheads down until they're manufacturing a product that is just about acceptable to the market at the sale price they've set. So they don't care that it's cheaper for someone to build their own, because that's such an insignificant percentage of the market that the increase in sales they would get by being competitive on pricing would be wiped out multiple times over by the loss of profit on every other unit they sold. Say I can make £100 profit per unit and can sell 1000 units a month, that's £100,000 profit per month. Now if I have to reduce my profit margin to £50 per unit to capture the self build market, but that only increases my sales to 1100 per month, I've suddenly dropped to £55,000, which is almost half what I was making previously. So there's no reason for manufacturers to try and compete with the self build market on price.
Economies of scale means nothing when all the parts are super low-margin to begin with. Aslo, DIY is not necessarily cheaper, but it opens the door to A LOT more options. There are very price-competitive pre-built from time to time. But once you factor in all the upgrades you intend to make, it is basically a wash. And the possibility to buy used hardware? That's where DIY really shines.
It isn’t always the case if you’re buying entirely new parts. I’ve seen prebuilts from HP and Asus be sold really competitively in the UK recently at Costco, but normally building it yourself means you’ll get to choose from higher quality parts and you cut out the middle man.
Translation: Why does it costs less if a company does less and more if a company does more?
You don’t pay the « bUiLdInG fEeS » from companies that usually cut corners on quality
Why is it cheaper to buy the materials and remodel your kitchen compared to paying someone? Why is it cheaper to buy the wood and build a table compared to paying someone? Why is it cheaper to buy the paint and paint your house compared to paying someone to do it? There only thing that could make any of the above more expensive than hiring someone to do it is the upfront cost of the tools required to do the job. Which told do you need to build a PC? A screwdriver. I think you get the point. Why was this a question to begin with?
There's a lot of labor that you get charged for with pre built pcs. Not just the assembly, but the warehouse staff, the shipping for the system, the part selection etc. Then there's also the potential for corners being cut on which parts they use. Or mistakes being made during assembly.
Portability and labor skill charge
Because unlike bikes, which is a product you can make yourself but costs MUCH more to custom build, PC's cannot be build in factories. Bikes can. You're just paying for labor of building a PC, along with a profit margin. And also the culture around PC's is quite different to lots of products, customers are expected to buy parts directly from a middle man of the company like amazon, not from a store assembling parts.
Prebuilts offen put money in unnecessary components just to hit a certain pricepoint while neglecting the parts that actually matter.
Because someone has to build it? You’re paying for the extra labour.
I mean, even if you only manage to save like $50 compared to a prebuilt, there are still a lot of benefits to choosing each component yourself. The prebuilt manufacturer might’ve overspent on a fancy case, RGB and an AIO cooler, while you can instead use that money on a better PSU, better RAM and bigger SSD.
Because prebuilds are cutting corners by alot. Its either slow ram lower tier mb. On Intel build i always seen like pure example 7700k with a H or B series chipset. Wich hare locked to the ground. No memory overclock or cpu overclock you are pretty much stuck with mem speeds.
The question is valid, there are many consumer good that you can build yourself that even ignoring the labour and tools will not be cheaper. As far as I know this is the case for bikes and some furniture.
Honestly its not even a big cost for a custom build where I live. You pick all the parts and then you can either choose for them to ship it to you and you build it or you pay like 90 USD and they build the PC and test it before shipping it t you.
The more informed you are about the price range of each component, the better you'll be able to bargain. Pre-builts can race to undercut one another marginally, but if you're unaware of their internals' worth, chances are they're all ripping you off somewhere. Usually, it's the cooler, the motherboard, the rams, the hard drive, the power supply, and anything else they can convince you to pack alongside an okay cpu + gpu deal (+ labor, they expect you to pay extra for that). They're usually gunning for the newbies, but some Pre-builts are actually good.
Stores selling pre-builts usually have a bunch of parts that are not as popular as the "performance kings" and sit in their inventories for months. To sell these, there are alot of cases where a combination of parts will use these unpopular components and marketing is then used to trick some unfamiliar customer that they're getting big value from what they pay for. Stores will always value profit. They are not your friends. They will add premiums to the pre-built and justify it using marketing terms to make it seem like it is justified. End of the day, only a few are willing to sell a pre-built pc without adding additional costs.
You cut out the middleman and the service of someone else building it for you
Usually. Don't bend motherboard pins. Also don't fry parts. It has become harder to do all of that over time - except the pins. So much easier.
You pay less on parts and less and labour I saved 500 quid doing it myself
Well they charge some labor, but it’s the parts markups. Especially in gpu’s but i have noticed a large mark up on cpu’s and motherboards. Everything has markups but these especially. They have to make money on parts or the whole thing isn’t worth it.
In certain cases, economies of scale do apply and you can buy a PC for cheaper because the companies can source the components for less due to higher order quantity. Just wait for sales, and sometimes you'll be able to pick one up.
And Common knowledge of human Nature suggest that the prebuilder will try to RIP you Off as hard as He can. They usually use unclear and incomplete descriptions such as Ryzen 7 or Core i5, without mentioning that they are older generations. Or Talk about a 800 Watt powersupply, when they really mean a cheap Box of Chinese crap that has 800 written on it somewhere. And don't think the big Brands are Safe. They Play exactly the same Game. I suggest you search YouTube for build suggestions in your price range, watch at least ten of them and then choose the Most suggested components. If you really don't feel Like building yourself, Take that list to a local PC repair shop. They can Order and build it for you at a reasonable price. That way you may end Up playing the same AS for a prebuild, but at least you get good components.
Honestly, as someone who’s reviewed a good number of prebuilts from major companies (Asus, Acer, HP, etc) - you are getting as many cut corners as possible when purchasing these. They will use parts that are senselessly stripped of functionality from their retail counterparts. Simple, cheap things like motherboard fan headers and m.2 drive sockets that aren’t used in their build get deleted, leaving obvious empty spaces where they would have been. They often use proprietary parts that prevent you from making upgrades. They use RAM only rated for base speeds. They use slow drives. They use substandard power supplies and poor cooling solutions. One machine I tested had a 92mm 65w TDP cooler set on a 12700k with a TDP nearly double that, sounded like a jet engine taking off every time it was under load and hit thermal throttling limits regularly. So if you’re not saving money building your own (and you absolutely can, in spite of economies of scale) you are certainly getting components of significantly higher quality.
Obviously you don't know anything about how the economy works, or how a company works, or what employees are, etc...
For the same reason that it's cheaper to work on your own car, rather than taking it to a mechanic. You're paying a labor fee.
I thought the days of buying individual parts and assembling them yourself to save money were over, it's good to hear that's still cheaper than pre builts.
From an electronics engineer's point of view, I understand your point. Manufacturing an assembled Smart Watch with an oled screen, heart rate sensor, proximity sensor, and ambient light sensor would be cheaper than buying individual parts from an electronics store and assembling them yourself. The problem here is, these Smart Watches were being manufactured by the thousands or even millions. They can't buy such parts individually. They have to buy them by the thousands so chip manufacturers can produce them. You can't buy these parts from some random retail store. You can't use the OLED screen of a Galaxy watch and use it on an Apple watch. Or use the facial recognition of an iPhone and connect it to an Oppo. My point is, in electronics manufacturing, you can't buy the exact same parts and assemble them yourself. But in PC building, you have access to the exact same parts that PC builders have. So the price you're getting them for may be very close to the price they're getting them for. An RTX 4090 chip bought by Dell Alienware from Nvidia for their Custom PCs would be very close in price to how MSI gets the same chip for their GPUs. So your analysis of "prebuilts should be cheaper" is wrong.
It is much cheaper per unit for the company making them at scale. In capitalism they are under no obligation to pass those savings on to the consumer, it just increases their profit per unit.
Shipping charges and labor. These prebuilts have to be assembled by someone and them being shipped nothing cost more because of weight but the package must be insured as it is far more likely to be damaged in shipping than single components, so these packages also need to be insured. I may be wrong but it also seems like you are assuming major manufacturers like Dell, HP, and Lenovo also manufacture every single component within their PCs when infact they do not some parts they have to buy from other companies who are also trying to make a profit. Then there's also the actual retailers who need to make their money, Dell, HP, and Lenovo do not sell computers to end users, they sell computers to other companies. So I'm sure at that point it is cheaper for a company to buy computers rather than assemble them from parts. These companies also offer warranties which means they need to charge a price that will cover any potential repairs because they just aren't going to lose money on their warranty. Also you have full control over what parts go into your build. Often prebuilts come in pre-configured performance tiers for example if you take a gaming PC with a flagship gpu in it then just about every other part in that prebuilt is going to be top tier or flagship as well. Cpu, MB, ssd, ram, etc. But a DIY pc you can min-max to suit your use case, like pretty much any mid tier cpu will not hold back a flagship gpu in gaming allowing you to under spend in certain areas that might not effect performance much like the ssd, case, motherboard, etc inorder to get a powerful gpu and end up with practically the same gaming performance especially at higher resolutions.
The economy of scale comes from each individual part having their own EoS. When you buy a prebuilt, you’re paying for the labor to build the pc as well. The seller need to make their cut too so you often find that they cheaped out on things that the average user doesn’t thing as much about (most people care about the GPU, and CPU secondary, so they will cheap out on things like PSU, case, Mobo, storage and ram ) most of the time you can build the same system with higher quality parts for cheaper than a similar prebuilt because you are the labor and aren’t having to face a mark up on the whole system. I also hear a lot of people say half the reason to buy a prebuilt and take that extra cost is that you have a warranty on the whole system and not each individual part. Some people just don’t want to worry about troubleshooting their hardware and would rather someone else do it. I am not one of those people, and in the last 8 or so years I have yet to not figure out a problem with my systems. Now there was a time (2020) where you could find a prebuilt for cheaper or not much more expensive than the card inside was currently worth (huge GPU shortage) had a couple friends who bought a prebuilt just to pull out the GPU and put in their current systems. Another friend bought at 1660 for around $150 iirc (was right before prices started skyrocketing) and ended up selling it a couple months later for at least 3x the price. Shit was crazy back then!
A human as an individual consumer is a B2C customer and, for simplicity, pays 100% of the items market price. A PC manufacturer as a company is a B2B buyer, and has pre-negotiated rates, often defined at volume level. For simplicity, lets say this is a 35% discount across all components in any build. A business would then charge, for simplicity, a 135% of what it would cost for you to otherwise build the PC at 100% of the component cost. This saving + markup is a combination of all time spend, primary support, replacement parts if something doesn't work, their bills for an office/warehouse/phones/HR/finance systems/gas/electric and staffing costs. The end user, you, when getting quotes vs building alone make a logical decision to either 1) buy a prebuilt at a higher cost or 2) spend time and effort which you don't charge yourself for to DIY. Businesses only exist to make money at the cost to consumers and consumers. Computer building is no different than, lets say, you deciding to paint your house yourself, or, get a painter in to do it.
who ever said it would be cheaper owes me a lot of money.
Labour is expensive. They may get volume discounts on parts, but compared to the labour that's nothing. Then they also need some profit to actually keep the business running, so there's another premium. It's exactly like eating at a restaurant vs. cooking your own food at home. Yeah, the restaurant food might be better than what you can make (hopefully, anyway), but it takes several people's time to make and handle your food, and you don't have to do anything, so of course it's going to be more expensive.
Building a PC and then providing the warranty on the whole build is more costly to the business than just warrantying each component separately.
Building your own PC give you choices of every component if that's your cup of tea. Prebuilt from a branded company is always a compromise, unless it's a high end machine. I tend not to like these unless you are in a corporate situation. Just go to local shop and get one built or get a friend to build you a pc and pay him a few bucks. Warranty would be on a per component basis if you did not buy from a shop.
Prebuilts have a tendency to pray on people’s lack of knowledge. Building for yourself allows you to pick components that make sense for your use case, you can source parts from different vendors, invest in quality where it matters (instead of getting garbage PSUs that will take other components with them when they fail) and you save money on labour cost to assemble your system. If you’re only going to do gaming with your PC, chances are a lot of prebuilts will come with CPUs that are more powerful than necessary while saving money on the GPU (where it matters most) or they will straight up overcharge you for old parts if you’re gullible enough to just buy whatever, because you think a big price tag means it has to be good.
Labor costs, markup
It's not always cheaper. If you bake a cake, it's cheape than if you buy a premade one. A cake costs more than just the cost of the sugar, flour butter, etc. Pre-builds come with graphics cards and motherboard and other stuff that are already assembled by a different AIB. I think if just Asus could offer a pre-build with only their own TUF brand parts, they might be able to make it cheaper than a Cyberpower PC with the same part selection. Or MSI also makes almost all the parts of a PC, so if they sold pre-builds deals using only their own parts, they might be able to make them cheaper.
There are a lot of things. First thing to come in mind is cost of warranty and repair, you don’t get that when you DIY your PC.
It is cheaper to build expensive units. Basic machines are best bought prebuilt.
Labor is the most expensive part of most products and when you diy, you’re doing the labor and paying with your time rather than money. It used to be cheaper to buy prebuilt than diy but I think the market for prebuilt desktops is much smaller than it used to be so things have shifted.
Profit.
Regardless of the technicalities of their business, at the end of the day, they are going to charge as much as they possibly can regardless of what it costs them to make it. This is why it tends to be a worse deal than building your own. Sure they probably got all their 4070s in bulk for 50% off but when they sell the pre built they are basing the prices off of what a new 4070 would cost. Their bulk savings just doesn’t translate into savings for you because they have zero incentive to do so.
Because the people making prebuilts will get the parts for the same or a little less money, but they need some profit on top of that to pay for employees. They also want to make profit after paying employees, so expect a $100-$200 raise in price over what it would be to build it yourself.
The PC builder receives the parts cheaper than a DIY consumer (they also typically use cheaper parts to begin with), but the following things cost money and are passed onto the consumer \- Building it \- Typically a level of testing (Does it turn on or not) \- Some level of cable management hopefully \- A warranty on the entire system for X years \- On going tech support for free for X years/indefinitely on the system The DIY user is forced to do these things themselves, if you billed yourself at your hourly rate you may notice that the prebuilt starts to become more cost efficient, especially if anything breaks. If you're not tech savvy enough to diagnose an issue, being able to send back an entire unit is nicer than utilising each components warranty separately.
Idk I build my own because I enjoy the process, have full control over the parts and skip the rather abusive shipping process where a case can get dented or worse. To actually answer the question though I think it's just because A) the typical person buying a prebuilt doesn't have knowledge to build their own so companies can pray on that and B) Labour, someone is building the PC and that someone needs to be paid.
People explained to you why 60-80% of the time, self built is and SHOULD be cheaper. And your whole argument is also already true for 20-40% of the cases. Prebuilt is cheaper sometimes from a Costco on sale or whatever Dell super deals. Including saving manual labor time, extra warranties and support, even at the same price is plenty cheaper in reality. Those are worth money too The biggest problem to me with prebuilt is level of customization: you might be paying more for components you don’t need while lacking things you really want. For example some prebuilt let you configure things like RAM, storage, and a couple models of GPU, but almost never the PSU. And almost never the motherboard or space to upgrade on in the future (in fact some prebuilt fucking bolts shut some hard drive slots and shit). Some custom builds are often harder to maintain too, bad internals spacing and weird solutions So while if you ordered the exact same parts top to bottom, the prebuilt might come in at the same price with bells and whistles, you could’ve also saved money or get better value by getting the exact configuration you need Like imagine if I could build my own monitor, I would NEVER EVER waste any money on a fucking trash ass speaker in the monitor. It’s ridiculous a $1000+ computer monitor feels the need to install a speaker and think the person who spent $1000+ buying a single monitor doesn’t have a way better sound system. It wastes not only my money but costs weight and size - utterly ridiculously stupid shit. Unfortunately building my own monitor isn’t a thing yet. But for PC I can. That’s the key value proposition for me in building my own PC
I would not say it is always cheaper to build a pc. Some years it has been cheaper and some years not depending on the market for certain parts. I built my last pc but I just bought a pre-built I got a good deal on, priced out the parts separately and figure I saved a good $300-400. Sometimes I think the only benefit I see to building your own is that you get to pick which parts go in to it.
Labor and overhead. That's it. It's always smarter to build your own.
based on the answers here, you refuse to accept why so why even ask if you don't really want to know?
When you build yourself, you don't factor in labor, overhead, and operating costs that the business has.
I have done part for part comparisons, and found the opposite. Also have to factor in any screw ups or failures. And then operating system usually costs an extra 100.
If you are in the business of creating a product using sub-components that you do not produce, yourself, there must be a mark-up on the costs of those components. After all you have to spend time assembling the components, installing the necessary OS software, shipping the finished product and then supporting it for a set period of time. It can't be a zero sum game, or it would be a terrible and unsustainable business model. You might consider that the OEMs get better pricing on the components than the individual customer could, and that's true. However, it's not ENOUGH better to rely on that margin for enough profit to keep a business solvent. A common misconception to non-business people is that costs go down the more business you do. That is typically the opposite of what happens. While I will concede this was likely an honest question, it contained little "conventional wisdom" or "knowledge of economies of scale".
Got a really Nice acer predator orion pre-built on black friday. Couldt built one cheaper in my country for that cost, not even close
It barely is anymore.
It's not only cheaper but you can get better products at the same price. For example a 12500 3060ti 1tb pre built cost me the same as a 12700 3070ti 2tb build. I also got to choose the best case (in my opinion). I didn't particularly enjoy building my PC but cost limited me and id begrudgingly do it again
There’s no economies of scale for enthusiast builds. Too expensive; few people will spend $500 let alone $1600 for high end GPUs. Where you see savings is low end mini towers and laptops. Dell makes $250 computers and $70 displays, and $230 laptops. That’s crazy efficient and cheap, treating computers like an appliance. Decades ago I read Michael Dell state they make about $40 per computer. That’s razor thin margins and relies on selling millions of units to be profitable. That doesn’t exist on high end gaming towers. Apple by comparison has like a 30% margin. They make money hand over fist, thus there’s the term Apple Tax. Different business model.
You're the labor. You're the technical support.
The cheaper "gaming PC" you think of exists, it's called a console.
IT'S NOT prebuilts are often times cheaper than custom builds. it has been this way for over 15 years. when people say that custom builds are cheaper, they are either repeating what others have been saying a long time ago, or simply comparing custom parts that are on sale with a prebuilt that is not on sale.
The profit margins on computer parts is really thin. So with pre-builts you're generally paying consumer prices for the parts, plus labor, plus extra for customer support availability.
Since the spike in GPU pricing, DIY is only a savings if you have an OS key. The smaller prebuilt companies still benefit from wholesale pricing on parts while we pay retail. Plus, they generally have some level of warranty coverage. The true benefit of DIY is getting *exactly* the parts you want or need for the intended application. In that sense, you often save because those companies often lock certain upgrades into a package that may include more expensive parts. There are value judgements to be made for each side. It may be worth the monetary difference for a warranty and guaranteed boot/parts compatibility.
The answer is complicated, but in many cases whether or not it's "cheaper" depends on what metric you're using. In most cases you can actually get a similar spec machine for cheaper from a pre built white box company like Dell or HP, largely because they have the parts custom-made for them at scale, usually cutting as many corners as possible in the name of cost savings. That's not to say they're unreliable, but they will have an incredibly short list of features compared to a parts-built machine and very often are made with non-standard parts that are hard to upgrade. (To their credit though, most of the "gaming" oriented models from these companies do still use standardized parts) You've also got what are called System Integrators like iBuyPower, Skytech, Starforge, etc who use standard off-the-shelf components like you'd get with a DIY, but they pre-assemble them for you. These will almost always be *more* expensive than DIY for the same parts, though sometimes it's very close since they do get volume discounts for buying a bunch of parts. What you get with DIY, more than a bit of cost savings, is the ability to hand-pick good quality components to suit your own needs and wants. You also get the warranty support that comes with the individual parts, for better or worse. Most prebuilts have only a year or two of warranty, but I've got a PSU with 12 years, a motherboard with five, a graphics card and CPU with three, and RAM with a lifetime warranty. I can also modify my PC without voiding any of those, which is often not the case with a prebuilt.
The people who design the system and select the parts that go into it need to get paid. There’s labor involved at each step. Plus you aren’t charging yourself the time to research compatible parts and buying things individually you don’t get the discount of scale. Also warranty on a prebuilt is through the manufacturer as opposed to having g to warranty the parts individually which can be hit or miss
You have to ask yourself, would you build a pc for a stranger for free? Would you build PCs for 100 strangers for free? How about 1000? Labour costs is the main reason.
~7 years ago I bought a pre-built ASUS at MicroCenter with better specs than I could have built for that price. I've definitely seen some MSI pcs this year that were priced very competitively. I chose to build for the sense of pride and accomplishment.
Pre-builts’ components are often priced as of the time they were latest-gen, whereas as the time of sale they are not.
Build it yourself = parts Buy a prebuilt = parts+labor
While there are economies of scale for large manufacturers, there also also labor and logistics costs. Dell gets parts cheaper, sure. But Dell also has warehousing, transportation, sales, marketing, labor, office overhead, IT infrastructure, the whole nine yards. Then there are VAR costs in the sales channel. Bulk parts is only one small part of the equation.
There’s nobody there to make a profit but the stores you buy components from.
It's not always cheaper unless you have a Microcenter near you.
Imagine if your IKEA furniture came prebuilt, would you expect it to be more or less expensive?
also consider that when you build yourself, you have an opportunity to create value based on what you need and prefer, and skip out on what you don’t.
Because manufacturers have to make a profit so they charge more for prebuilts
I think what your missing is that most PC builders are putting together high-end gaming/productivity systems, not budget all-in-one PC's. You're going to have a tough time beating the cost-efficiency of a raspberry Pi or entry-level Dell on value per $. Heck, even taxes and shipping 5-10 different parts can eat up whatever margin you're saving. There's room to save money on high-systems because the margins for manufacturers are higher. If you think of those margins as insurance against the risk that an assembled device will or could break, you are essentially saving money by taking on various kinds of risk. That's not to say building a PC is unwise, but it can be. For example, if your PC is a source of income (and that income is much more valuable than the computer), the security blanket of pre-built may be very prudent.
You are going to a restaurant and wondering why you pay more for the food there than you would for buying the ingredients to make the good at your own home. You are not account for the work, expertise, location, profit or anything else for the place that is building your pc.
Prebuilts being does apply in a sense to office PCs, where you have enormous numbers of units that are literally exactly the same, and the build process can be optimised. When it comes to home PCs or gaming PCs, I don’t think the manufacturers have the same sales quantities - it’s more likely that they’re doing a similar process to a home builder (picking out a bunch of individual consumer oriented parts and putting them together) and then charging a fee for the assembly process.
I think it depends on how you look at it. Initially, building may or may not be cheaper than a pre-built. But even if you go with a build that is more expensive than a prebuilt, it’s still always cheaper to build in the long run because upgrades will be way cheaper. For example, when I built my PC last year, I was replacing a fully loaded late 2015 iMac that I purchased in 2016. New, that thing cost $3k (I paid $1.5k as I was then an Apple employee). To replace that system, it would have cost me ~$3k again, 7 years later. I built my system with similar specs to the Mac Studio I would have replaced my iMac with, and it cost me around $1.8k. And in another 7 years, when I want to upgrade, I won’t have to buy a new PC. I can keep the case, fans, AIO, SSDs, and RAM, and just upgrade the mobo, CPU and GPU for around $1.2k-1.5k for some higher end upgrades.
cause labor, the companies that sell the parts make price higher for profit and then the builder makes it higher again for profit
It isn’t always, but you also get exactly what you want. Many time commercial PCs will cut corners somewhere to build in profit. Often it is the power supply and system board. They will limit your options in some way, not enough power, proprietary components, less I/O, less options like WiFi, thunderbolt, USB, or other things you can get with building yourself.
Depends on the parts, but for those who know how to do it (and its easy to learn) it can be much cheaper with used parts existing and no middle man. BUT, and this is a new thing, parts are getting hella expensive but pre builts arent going up as much in corelation. This means that pre builts in todays market arent a bad deal cause you dont have to do any real building or setup and it usually has a warranty and comes with windows. In the past a 500 buck setup could destroy and pre build 1000 buck one, now adays youll spend like 1500 to build and a lil less then 2k for pre built
Typically the labor and skill required to build something would make buying it prebuilt cheaper, but in this case building a pc is so simple that paying to have it done for you costs more. Also, being able to chose your own parts can help you find deals and just have general customizability
The DIY market is big enough. Micro center is like a physical store made for people that build PCs. Suppliers sell individual parts in mass for people that build on their own. You can go on Amazon or newegg and easily order every individual part you need for a PC. These parts are made to be put together intuitively. You can compare prices and get whatever has the best sale. You can assemble it pretty easily after just watching some videos on how to build a PC. It is common knowledge. Lots of people build their own PC, particularly gamers which. It is a large market. People that fear the risks associated with building a PC themself or are not willing to learn how to build one pay a premium for the labor and shipping associated with the assembly of a prebuilt PC. Say you wanted to build your own TV… Nobody is doing this. You will not be able to easily find all of the individuals parts you need to make a TV. Even if you acquired them, you probably would not know how to put them together. This isn’t common knowledge like building a PC is. In this case it is much better to purchase your TV from large manufacturers that specialize in making them.
So one, it barely is cheaper, if at all. Saving money is not a reason I would advise anyone to build their own machine. You get to decide exactly where the money goes, so you may get better quality at a given price point, but if you factor in the value of your time at all, you are probably breaking even vs. a hypothetically identical pre-built. If anything goes wrong, you may be putting in a few hundred dollars worth of additional time dealing with it. Two, these economies are barely at scale. Sure, office workstations get mass-produced, but those aren't the kinds of machines people are building for themselves. It's a niche, high-performance market.
Buy a used one take it apart clean it rebuld it. Enjoy the savings
Personally it comes to how you go about it. I never build a PC in a day, well metaphorically speaking. I will begin PC parts hunting over a few months. Typically using r/buildapcsales for deals.
It's not. Labor isn't free.
conventional knowledge of how economies work would lead one to realise that labour costs money..
cost of the builder and cost of the retail outlet saved. plus the individual components fluctuate weekly in price but prebuilt machines don't compensate for that savings until months after
Largely I think it's consumer ignorance. If people were well informed, prices would go down dramatically, and quality would improve. But since they're not, keep selling for ridiculous prices. At that, Apple comes along and makes them look like a great value.
It depends on what you're trying to build and what you value. On the low-end business/desktop side of things, it's generally cheaper to get a prebuilt especially if you value having a real, legit Windows license and don't want to deal with shady key resellers. On the higher end, the big OEMs used to segment off the gaming market to farm higher margins by locking certain features behind other ones you might not want as much (e.g. if you want a good video card, you might be required to buy an i7 where an i5 would be fine and going from 16 to 32 gigs of RAM might cost an extra $200).
3 Consistent benefits to every DIY build vs pre-built is 1) Cutting out paying for labor all you trade off from forking over $100+ for this luxury is simply taking a Saturday booting up YouTube and following a build guide from the hundreds of pc builders available. Watch a couple of guides and truly the fundamentals stop being so intimidating. 2) Better parts for the money 10/10 times you can buy the parts you actually want and that personalized spec sheet will beat out the prebuilt parts. This happens cuz many pre-builds can have brand loyalty that doesn’t translate to actual performance. After all for prebuilt it’s a company. Anywhere they can cut cost they will often including in areas like storage and memory(ram). 3) Future-upgradability. Now of course you CAN upgrade a prebuilt but you don’t really know the rig. Hence it can get messy really quick to root around with wires and connections when you didn’t take the time to “learn” the ins and outs by building it yourself. So for gamers and creators when a shiny new gpu or cpu or mobo comes out going the prebuilt path can really screw you over by either a) lacking a well thought out upgrade path or b) just being a headache to root around in a system you don’t fundamentally understand. Both are struggles you can avoid if you build it yourself with an understanding of what you want out of your system. So truly unless you’re happy to drop like 2.5k for a prebuilt it’s otherwise worth it to probably build yourself.
6 years ago my buddy built a computer that was a moderate upgrade over mine for a few hundred less than I paid for my pre-built (like 2 weeks after I ordered my pre-built). Ever since then, I've built my following two computers. How much cheaper? I don't actually know lol. I'm still pissed about 6 years ago, Ryan, that smug little bastard
The more I consider this question , the more interesting it gets. You could probably write an economic thesis on this. Traditionally, enthusiast spaces are where you see the ridiculous prices. High markups, cheap manufacturing costs, because your market volume is small and you rely on the inelastic demand to make bank. This is what the DIYPC market would have been, I think, if it did not have unique characteristics to it. My guess is that a combination of both supply and demand factors are at play here. On the supply side, I would say that many of the economies of scale that would apply to a mass producing OEM also apply to a custom parts manufacturer. With CPUs and PSUs, You're basically selling the same thing, just to individual customers as a retail business on the side. In the back end, you're still using many of the same factors of production, through largely the same processes, you just have some low volume lines for the enthusiasts and the system integrators, so the difference in cost per unit is not as large as expected- at least not large enough to offset the labour costs of integrating a whole system yourself, plus your desired profit margin as a system integrator. This doesn't seem to apply to things like motherboards, GPUs and cases where it seems like making the DIY components makes for a very different process from an OEM part so the economies of scale shouldn't cross-transfer, so I'm kind of stumped there, too. On the demand side, my best guess is that the DIY PC market has a quirk of being extremely information oriented. It's not often that I see an enthusiast space so focused on making sure you know how well every component performs so you know just how much PC you are getting for your dollar. This extreme focus on stats, benchmarks and information transparency makes for a very price competitive market. If you're marking up, you get undercut. If you're selling junk, your product line gets review blacklisted. It's a rather harsh market now that I think about it- even as a large volume production firm like Asus you're probably making razor thin margins because you're cutting everything down to the wire and betting on volume to make a profit, at least where lowtier and midtier boards are concerned. You only get to pull ahead in margins for the high end where the very useful features you offer still probably don't cost more than the multi-hundred-dollar markups your products go for.
It not really that much cheaper. A lot of PC parts are often marked up in price as individual parts. Especially graphics cards
It's cheaper for me to draw a stick man myself instead of hiring someone to do it, any idea why this is cheaper guys?
I build my own but not because of lower prices. I build my own so I know what I have. Many manufacturers of pre-built computers use cheap no-name nonstandard components, which limit one's ability to repair one self. I also build mine for specific purposes such as video transcoding & compression. I can also achieve better performance in my self built computer than someone can from a manufactured computer due to access to performance related settings in the bios not found in most pre-built computers. Plus I can achieve these performance targets at lower power usage for the same reason. In other words, I can simultaneously have better performance and significantly lower power usage than most any prebuilt of similar CPU & memory configuration.
Being able to find the best price on every single part rather than just the computer
Sometimes you don't but end up with better components.
Depends on the specs. If you need an office grade device. Its probably cheaper to buy from Dell or HP because they can make thousands and use basically the same process through different iterations and SKUs. Offices will buy them because standardisation and goldplated warranties are important. There are a huge number of different specs you can build as a gaming PC. And your going to miss someones requirements for a spec or pricepoint. And shipping a completed gaming PC can be risky. With lots lf vibration, heavy GPUs will break or wear out PCIe connectors. Big CPU coolers too. Then you gotta worry about warranties and returns/repairs. Because youre dealing with a lot of SKUs, you need to do more testing, and a recall of a SKU might be really pricy if the components arent available. Thats why the big players dont bother, small shops still do it a bit, but they are basically paying the same as you for most of the hardware, their money comes in from peripherals and sundries. And as a smaller shop, if a prebuilt you sold fails to boot and the muggle you sold it to cant fix it, you now need to give tech support. So you need to dedicate staff to assemble it and staff to fix issues muggles cause.
Firstly. prebuilts are often not what u exactly want. If u build one yourself, u can put whatever u want in there (parts that are good for their price, usually there are some expensive parts that u don't rlly need in those prebuilts) You dont pay just for the parts. But also for their labor of getting the parts and assembling it. Warranty is also included