There’s a common misconception that building your own computer is expensive, difficult and time-consuming. While there was a precedent for this 10 years ago, it couldn’t be farther from the truth today.
Building your own computer is not only cost effective, it’s straight forward, bespoke and immensely satisfying. Read on to learn more about the benefits of this process.
1. It’s cost effective
Perhaps the biggest benefit to building a computer from the ground up is that you can pay a sum that’s appropriate to the type of machine you want. What does this mean? Well, you don’t have to worry about paying over the odds for an incredibly powerful machine you’re only going to use for browsing the internet and word processing. The same goes for gaming machines; it’s possible to get a lot more out of your machine if you’re the one making the judgement call over the components.
You can also save money in ways that mightn’t have seemed immediately obvious. Why splash out on a new monitor when you already have a 40-inch TV that can serve the same purpose? All you’ll need is the necessary VGA or HDMI cables to connect your display to the PC. Sites like Rapid Online sell both of these; if you choose to go with HDMI, it also mean you don’t have to worry about PC speakers, as audio will come through the TV.
2. It’s straight forward
Notice how we don’t say “it’s easy”. While making a computer isn’t the most difficult thing in the world, it does require a certain level of research and confidence to pull off successfully. If you’re coming at this completely blind, then we’d recommend doing some research online and watching some how-to videos on YouTube – the more up-to-date the better! To complement this research, make sure you read our own how-to that gives essential tips to building a better gaming computer.
Try to keep your first build as simple as possible. Read reviews on the individual components you’ll be buying and gauge whether you really need them. It’s unlikely that you’ll want to invest in liquid cooling, neon lights and complicated CPU heat sinks at this early stage.
3. It’s customizable
Building your own computer means you don’t have to settle for undesirable components and software that come packaged with a commercial build. Don’t like Windows 8? Build your computer from scratch and you can pick an operating system that you do like. Do you require a much larger hard drive to store your files? Incorporate a larger – or faster – one from the massive variety available online.
The same goes for any part of your PC; pick the component that’s as powerful or modestly priced as you need it to be.
4. It’s enjoyable
One of the more underrated benefits of building your own computer is the feeling of satisfaction you receive at the end. The most closely comparable feeling we can think of is woodworking; the process of starting from nothing and seeing it all come together into one personalized, functioning object is incredibly satisfying.
Even if things appear to go wrong, and you have to troubleshoot a few issues, there’s a wealth of information and computer help forums that can assist you.
[Image credit: TigerDirect.com, Flickr]
Hey Peter! Awesome post about the benefits of building your computer by own but do you still think that if someone who is completely noob trying to build up computer and if something goes wrong what will happen?
Chances are, the computer will not be able to start up. You may waste a lot of time trouble-shooting and trying to find the root cause of the error. That is why it is essential to learn the process properly first, and keep it simple on your first attempt.
Building a new computer does take some understanding about which components are compatible, but once you have that figured out actually assembling the computer isn’t too complicated. Components will usually only connect one way.
As a tip: the one component you don’t want to skimp on is the power supply. When building a computer you should always spend a little extra on a good, reliable power supply because the cheaper units can breakdown and cause damage to other components in the system.
That’s an excellent point. All the components are interlinked and interdependent, so if your power supply breaks down, the entire system will be corrupted and it becomes a headache to identify affected components. Thank you for your input Paul!
There is no doubt that building/assembling your computer from scratch is fun! You get to choose the best hardware for your needs and budgets and can tweak it the way you want. Actually I think its only going to become more mainstream. With projects like project Ara (for phones), we might have “more complete” computer components in future…just stack them up together, a bolt here and there and you are good to go.
No need to understand complex power systems etc.
Project Ara may help to open up the smartphone oligopoly and allow more small entrepreneurs to enter the market. And then we also have projects like Phonebloks. The idea of allowing us to fully customize our smartphones, without being controlled by corporations, is very promising! Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Charles!
Yes good points. Most important thing is that we can upgrade it later as per our need. e.g. recently I added SSD hard disk to my boot drive to speed up the computer and started using HDD only for storage.
Glad to know that, Tushar! I bet your system could run faster now with the SSD upgrade?
Yes much faster. But I read online that SSD is having read/write cycles limitations. Many people suggested me to move browser Photoshop cache to other non SSD drives to save the SSD. Do you have any info to share about this?
I wouldn’t know my way around a PC even if my life depended on it but I’m smart enough to know it’s way cheaper building it piece by piece than buying the whole system.
A college friend of mine is tech-savvy (he prefers geek) so he put together the PC I own right now. It cost me $800 and it’s better than computers that are sold for $1,200.
You’ve got an awesome friend, Joan. That PC would have easily went above $2000 in the retail store 🙂
This would be great to do and I do know a few people that have build their own PCs. I even know someone who made a business out of building top spec personalized PCs back in the 90s.
As you state in your article though, it takes a level of confidence and understanding of compatibility that I don’t feel I have the time to learn right now.
It does take some time to learn and build that confidence. If you still wish to have a taste of the building process, you can try purchasing pre-made components from DIY shops and assemble a simple computer following its step-by-step instructions. It gives you a better impression of the process, which eases your learning curve once you are free and ready to learn.
After reading your post, I decided to do some research and see what options I had available if I were to build my next computer. For less than what I would pay for a pre-built one, I can build something with twice the memory and a hard drive that is in the 2 TB range!
Pre-built computers are overpriced because of its assembly and retailing costs, not to mention markup for their own profits. When you build your own PC, all these additional service costs can be channeled into getting better specs.