Anyone dedicated to saving a buck could spend a little time researching, shopping and toiling to build their own PC. This has been true since the earliest days of personal computing. Usually, it would result in a considerable discount compared to an off-the-shelf, prebuilt PC.
That has changed. The AI-driven confluence of RAMageddon, the NAND-pocalypse and the heavy demand for powerful GPUs has made the current PC component market a nightmare to navigate. Things that were sometimes affordable, like RAM and storage, have skyrocketed in price. Graphics cards rarely drop below retail price, but now high-tier models can be several times more expensive than their launch MSRP… and that’s if you can find them at all.
With the market gone haywire, PC building isn’t what it once was. Original equipment manufacturers and boutique PC builders have advantages that DIYers don’t when it comes to sourcing components, and that means plenty of prebuilt systems actually have the advantage in price. I scoured the market for competitively priced prebuilt systems and then worked out the cost of a similar DIY configuration using PCPartPicker. The truth is that it’s ultimately not cheaper to build your own PC anymore. I explain how I got my price estimates at the end.
Every end of the market is affected
I wish I could say it was only the extreme high-end of the DIY market that has become overpriced, but it isn’t. The DIY prices I’ve found have proved more expensive than the most competitive prebuilts across budget, midrange and high-end configurations.
Most of the budget models I found were more expensive than DIY, but there were still some that were cheaper. There was more variability in the midrange and high-end market, but invariably, there were several prebuilt options that existed to undercut a DIY version.
One of the more affordable prebuilts I spotted was this HP Omen 16L from Sam’s Club at just $1,199. To DIY a PC with the same CPU, GPU and comparable memory and storage, I was looking at $1,544. A Lenovo LOQ Tower 26ADR10 available at Micro Center costs just $999. The DIY budget to replicate that hit $1,071 before even including a CPU and motherboard, which can’t even be copied because Lenovo used a special motherboard with a laptop CPU.
In the midrange, Sam’s Club offers an Asus ROG G700 with an Intel Core Ultra 7 265F, 32 gigabytes of DDR5 RAM, Nvidia RTX 5070 with 12GB VRAM and 2 terabytes of PCIe 4.0 storage for $1,749. I was looking at $2,033 to make a comparable DIY. For what it’s worth, I really tried to cheap out with my DIY attempts, opting for a $74 case, $89 power supply (don’t skimp on power supplies, people!) and a cheapo $54 cooler. Even if you got all three of those components for free, the DIY build would still cost $1,816.
I saw the biggest swings in the high-end simply because the margins add up that much more. One pre-builtOne prebuilt was $649 more expensive than DIY, while another prebuilt was $632 cheaper than DIY. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter that some prebuilts are more expensive than DIY. There will always be overpriced options. Average price differences can paint a more balanced picture between DIY and prebuilts, but it only takes one overpriced bad apple to skew the data. Only a few prebuilts need to outprice DIY for it to be effectively undercut, and that’s just what I saw.
Where you shop is huge
It doesn’t matter what your budget is, but it does matter where you shop. Whether you get a good deal on a prebuilt PC depends heavily on where you try to buy one.
Major OEMs weren’t making their prebuilts look great while I was browsing. Dell, HP and Lenovo didn’t offer many models that were compelling for the money. Lenovo’s Legion Tower 7i Gen 10
was $456 more expensive than DIY. HP’s Omen 35L was $73 more expensive, though its budget Omen 16L was actually $198 cheaper than DIY. Dell’s Alienware Aurora was $602 more expensive. I couldn’t find anything worth considering from Acer, and Asus wanted $300 more than Sam’s Club for its ROG G700 (and a Sam’s Club membership is way less than $300).
Best Buy was a bastion of reliable retail pricing during the GPU crisis of 2021, but I didn’t find many exciting options there without looking at brands I’d never heard of, like Yeytian or Andromeda Insights. I found three that looked like a decent value, but all three were more expensive than DIY by an average of $129. Best Buy had an HP Omen 35L configuration for $2,899 that did undercut DIY by $79, thanks to a $200 discount at the time, but that almost doesn’t matter since I found even better prebuilt systems for even less.
Going directly to prebuilt specialists was also hit-or-miss. For instance, iBuyPower’s RDY Trace X B01 beat DIY by $147, while Maingear’s Classic MG-1 | Elite and Classic MG-1 | Sapphire averaged $420 over the price of DIY.
Even outlets known for customer savings, like Costco, couldn’t be relied on universally. Costco averaged $222 more expensive on the six prebuilt systems I analyzed. Two were a better deal than DIY, but four of them averaged $408 more expensive. Costco has special incentives for its members through Costco Next, which offers discounts at the boutique builder CLX, and the brand’s CLX Set prebuilt proved $185 cheaper than DIY. Sam’s Club, in comparison, had an HP Omen 16L and Asus ROG G700 that were considerably cheaper than DIY, but it also had many options that didn’t appear competitive or even up to date.
The biggest nugget of gold I found was Micro Center. DIY enthusiasts likely know the name since the stores are stocked to the gills with DIY components. They also carry loads of prebuilt systems, both from major brands and through its in-house PowerSpec brand. Options I found from Micro Center were almost invariably cheaper than DIY, with an average savings of $336 and a max of $632 (for the PowerSpec G757). They also carried an Alienware Aurora ACT1250 for $2,399 that beat DIY by $532. Sadly, there’s a hitch. Most of the PCs from Micro Center are for in-store purchase only. It had just two shippable gaming desktops, and they were Not Cheap™. Even so, the HP Omen Max 45L configuration they offered for $5,499 is $297 better than DIY. Still, if you have a Micro Center nearby, it’s worth having a look at what they have in stock, given the potential to save a tidy sum.
Don’t discount smaller upgrades
All indicators show that DIY is not the best deal in town. I even configured a value-minded midrange build for myself with an Intel Core Ultra 7 265KF, RTX 5070 Ti 16GB, 32GB of DDR5-6000 and a 2TB NVMe 4.0 SSD. It was $2,377, almost as much as the high-end Alienware Aurora ACT1250 with a Core Ultra 9 285K and RTX 5080.
Just because building an entire PC from the ground up isn’t the deal it once was doesn’t mean you have to rule it out entirely. The beauty of desktop PCs is the ability to make changes as needed. My first desktop gaming PC was an open-box iBuyPower prebuilt with an AMD FX 8320 and Nvidia GTX 960 that was too close to the price of DIY for me to pass up in 2015.
After that, I’ve never bought another prebuilt. I eventually upgraded the GPU, added an SSD and swapped cases. Further on, I made the jump to Ryzen with a new motherboard and RAM, then another new GPU, a couple of CPU swaps, some extra RAM, more storage and more. My computer today is unrecognizable, but it still has the SSD I bought in 2016 as my first DIY upgrade. Crucially, not one of those upgrades costs as much as buying a new prebuilt outright, but they all gave me a jump up in performance and capabilities to keep up with the times.
There’s no shame in starting with a prebuilt and moving over to DIY in the future, especially when it lets you get more value on both fronts.
Methodology
To configure my DIY options, I assumed the worst of prebuilt systems when they provided vague component specs. I’d look for exceptionally cheap options to compete in DIY. For instance, if a prebuilt system advertised a 1TB SSD, I wouldn’t assume that it was a strong PCIe 4.0 SSD or even a PCIe SSD at all. Instead, I’d look for a cheap SATA SSD for the DIY build. Even that, however, isn’t a safe assumption to make. The PowerSpec G757, for instance, lists a 2TB NVMe SSD online, but it actually includes a PCIe 5.0 Crucial P510. In cases where prebuilts did provide more specifics or even advertised exact components, I tried to match my DIY configurations exactly.
Even when attempting to weasel my way below prebuilt prices, I generally couldn’t. For most DIY builds, I included the same 750-watt power supply and all-in-one cooler. It’s possible to find a cheaper power supply that might work in these builds, but not by much before breaking into dicey power territory. I chose that AIO cooler for its affordability, but also because it should be able to handle any of the various CPUs in these builds. So it may be possible to shave off a little money by going with a small tower cooler, but again, it will be marginal savings. I also included a $139 Windows 11 Home license for each DIY build.
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