PC Hardware in a Nutshell, Second Edition

Building or Buying a PC

The make-or-buy decision is a fundamental business school concept. Does it make more sense to make a particular item yourself or just to buy it? With entry-level PCs selling for $600 and fully equipped mainstream PCs for $1,500, you might wonder why anyone would bother to build a PC. After all, you can’t save any money building one, can you? Yes, you can. Quite a bit of money, in fact. But that’s not the only reason to build a PC. Here are good reasons to do so:

Choice

When you buy a PC, you get a cookie-cutter computer. You may be able to choose such options as a larger hard drive, more memory, or a better monitor, but basically you get what the vendor decides to give you. And what you get is a matter of chance. High-volume direct vendors like Gateway and Dell often use multiple sources for components. Two supposedly identical systems ordered the same day may contain significantly different components, including such important differences as motherboards or monitors with the same model number but made by different manufacturers. When you build a PC, you decide exactly what goes into it.

Component quality

Many computer vendors save money by using OEM versions of popular components. These may be identical to the retail version of that component, differing only in packaging. But OEM versions have several drawbacks. Many component vendors do not support OEM versions directly, instead referring you to the computer vendor. And OEM versions often differ significantly ...