I don’t know what the situation is like in turbo-consumer USA, but here in Australia lots of people, especially old-school IT people and smaller businesses, still like to build their own PCs from commodity parts when they need a new desktop or server box. That’s all fine and good fun when you’re building a box for home, because spending the extra time building the PC is part of the fun. But I really think that for business, it’s kind of dumb.
The experiences I’ve had with name-brand pre-built PCs have been excellent. I’ve had an old Toshiba laptop with a broken screen (from being walked on), it just kept working with a monitor hooked up. I’ve still got a Dell server that’s a fair few years old now and it just chugs along at the ISP, without so much as a hiccup since it was put there. At work we have a HP server that was $1600 including Windows Small Business Server 2003, that thing is great as well, it hasn’t missed a beat.
I’ve also worked in places where they tried to skimp out and use commodity hardware. It just doesn’t work, and the people who have to use the gear get jaded and cynical. At one place I worked they had a tennis ball and cricket bat for when the network/server went down! Great stuff. The business was paying top dollar to their IT company for this sub-standard commodity equipment, might I add, and I would assume that they still are to this day.
Despite Dell having a few problems, I really think buying from Dell, HP or IBM (or ASUS) is the smart choice. How could you really think that building a one-off PC from a mish-mash of parts is going to be as reliable and well-sorted as a name-brand manufacturer’s? What is the chance that your one-off will be better than the thousands of machines all exactly the same, with who knows how many hours of research and development time to iron out any glaring problems, and then field testing by anyone who’s bought the same product before you? I’d say the chance is pretty small.
You don’t even save that much money anyway. Dell and IBM, for example, now have servers, desktops and notebooks under $1000. Especially for a business, even if the cost is a few hundred dollars more for an equivalent machine, I think that money is easily going to be spent later on in repairs, consulting (if you need a consultant to help you fix, say, data corruption caused by your dodgy hardware), lost business revenue or productivity because of the downtime, or new parts. Not to mention the stress placed on you and the possibility of decreased morale and cynicism because of having to work with substandard gear.
So next time you’re thinking about building your own machine, unless you have really special needs I’d seriously consider saving yourself the trouble and buying a pre-built box. It really is worth it, in my opinion.