The DIY route can be fun. For laughs (well, I think I might be able to do it soon), I put together a desktop on Newegg, just to see what it’d cost. Minus any random cables that I made need to buy, depending on who packs them in, it comes to a grand total of $1225.60, including 3 day shipping and before any mail-in rebates. And I could easily get this down to about $700 if I wanted to, as I probably don’t really need that 120GB SSD for my OS partition, or a soundcard that can do 24-bit/192KHz audio and 7.1 surround out of my computer. But it’s a device that costs about $500 more than a middle of the road pre-fab machine, will last me for a good 5 years before it really starts showing its age, and it’ll serve multiple purposes. I’ve got an HD monitor already, and a combo CD/DVD/HD-DVD/Bluray drive, so it becomes an automatic media center. Over time, adding another 24GB of RAM until I max out the motherboard’s capability will mitigate some of the aging issues. Still, even if you’re not terribly technically inclined, it’s not hard to go through newegg or some other site and put together a machine, and be certain all your components will work together. When you pick a case, it’ll tell you in th technical details section “This case has X number of slots for drives, can support Y form factors for the motherboard,” and such. You get to your motherboard, make sure it’s Y form factor. It’ll tell you in the motherboard’s page “This board supports Z type of CPU sockets, and the following variety of connections for other hardware.” Make sure to pick a CPU with that type of socket. Make sure when you add your video card, it’s a variety of PCI card that’ll hook up to your motherboard.
It can be just like any other sort of project if you think about it properly. You pick your first component, and build up from there. If you’re working on installing a new sink and you know that the pipes leading up to your taps have a certain dimesion, you look for something that’ll connect to, say 1/2" pipes rather than 3" ones. The only difference is, instead of 1/2" or 3", you get terms like ATX motherboards, PCI Express 2.0 x16, or AMD FM1 CPUs. Also, a good chunk of hardware comes with warranties by the manufacturor. If you’ve built your own computer and your shiny, new 8 core monstrosity of a CPU craps out after 6 months, chances are pretty good you can call up AMD or Intel, and get a new one sent out. If you’ve got a pre-built machine that you bring in to a computer shop, you’re paying for parts that you probably could have got for free under your warranty, plus $40/hr or more for someone to do something that you could learn how to do in all of a half hour, with the help of a couple quick youtube tutorials. Whether or not you actually want to is a different matter entirely, but I think a lot of people over-estimate the difficulty of computer repair. A lot of it is just googling, “Have a computer doing such and such,” or “Error message ‘Oymyakon is cold as hell, you broke something’” and following instructions. Usually, smarter people than you or I have run into the same problem before, and have written up an explanation of what it means, as well as step by step instructions for how to fix it.