General_Norris wrote:At least in this side of the pond small specialized shops have better prices than building the computer myself piece to piece while I find at least a 60% overcharge on any big store, supermarket or mainstream shop.
I've not seen one 'round here that is. I wouldn't say it's impossible...just...not common. Technically, it should be true, provided they get parts at good wholesale and don't charge much for labor. What's a lot more common is that prices are higher. Online, "specialty" shops tend to just start with mid or high range machines with a healthy profit margin.
Economies of scale reduce cost, not price!
Most people don't care about computers, they just take 1K€ to the supermarket and buy the shit that has the bigger numbers written on it*. They don't compare, learn about the product they want to buy or otherwise follow their basic costumer duties. Hence Walmart can raise the price, put an ignorant minimun-wage worker to sell the pcs and it works out.
When you're building it yourself, cost is the same as price.
Just because Wal Mart or whomever gets their margin in doesn't mean something can't be cheap too. Again, I'm talking about bottom of the barrel here. It's marketing. Look at most consumer electronics - make them cheap, and more people will line up to buy them. I agree, most don't know much about what's in the machine...but what they do know is that it was $399, and came with a monitor and a printer.
My point was just that if you're building to try and compete with that (for some reason), chances are you won't see all that much benefit to doing so. For example, Dell's low end tower right now (Inspiron 570) bases at $350 with an Athlon II X2 250, 4GB of memory, a 500GB HDD, DVDRW, media reader, and your typical bundled KB/mouse/Windows/etc.
On Newegg, the CPU is $62. RAM/mobo are hard to say exactly, since Dell seems to be using older stock, so different products are actually slightly cheaper. IE, going with an 880G board would be no real cost difference than a 785G like the Dell has. In turn, DDR3 can be used, which is cheaper than DDR2 at this point. So say $55 for the board, $25 or so for RAM. Thanks to HDD shortages, a 500GB drive starts at around $100 currently. Say another $20 for a DVD burner. Say around $12 for a KB and mouse, again, just going with the cheapest.
At that point, you're already at $274. With no case, no PSU, and no Windows license. Even if the HDD wasn't twice what it woulda been a few months ago, all you'd really be doing is looking for the cheapest thing to include. To me, that defeats a lot of the point of building.
I don't disagree that as you go up in price, the margins get larger, and it becomes a lot more feasible to not only get better parts, but come in cheaper as well. My point is just that there are limits to that.
I found this site
http://www.ibuypower.com/. You can build your own Gaming computer from scratch on it. Have any of you ever used this site?
I've looked at it before, checked builds for people, that sort of thing. Since they list the actual parts they're using in most cases, you can actually compare it against Newegg/etc to see how much more they're charging - though if I remember, they aren't really that bad in that regard.
. I'm not too worried about a boot HDD at the moment because I don't plan on playing very many games. Just 3 or 4 of the newer games coming out along with some of my old Mech Commander/Mech Warrior Games.
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