Digital Home Thoughts: Does Building Your Own PC Really Save You Money?

We've had an interesting discussion about the pros and cons of self-building a PC, and some of the comments were around whether or not it saves money to build the PC yourself. Some people said that it did for them, but since that flew in the case of my own experience, I decided to do a little experiment. I went to Dell.ca and priced out the following Intel Core i7-based system:

The price from Dell for that? $999 Canadian. To create a comparison, I went to the online store of my local computer parts store, which tends to be quite affordable. See how I did after the break.

I tried to match the parts as closest as possible to the Dell, and in every instance other than the case, I picked the least expensive parts I could. When it came to the case, I selected one with a reasonable power supply - there were a few that were $30 less, but they only had 300 watt power supplies, and with the power-hungry Intel Core i7 I felt a 500 watt PSU would be the best bet.

As you can tell, the build-it-yourself route, for parts alone, cost about 23% more than the system from Dell. This is about what I was expecting. Personally, the reason I tend to prefer to build my own computers is so I can pick the best-of-breed parts - I rarely if ever save money. I also like knowing exactly what's inside the computer, so if something goes wrong, I have better odds of fixing or replacing the faulty part. One exception would be if I'm cannibalizing parts from another computer, but that doesn't happen very often if I'm building a new machine for my own use - I tend to want the latest and greatest parts. Worth noting though is that things get more expensive if I were to upgrade the video card on the Dell. If I go for an ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB, Dell wants $350 for that, when locally I can get one for $199. So that's quite the overcharge!

Bottom line: shop around, compared parts to pre-built, but if you're looking to save money you may want to go with a pre-built computer.