Myth of Building Your Own Computer

There are many myths that surround building a computer and doing a PC upgrade. Many people are under the assumption that computers are very difficult machines to work with and that you need to be a professional to work on them. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Not only are computers easy to work on but they’re very easy to understand as well. Let’s attack some of the common myth of building a computer.

The first myth that many people hear is that if you build your own computer it’s going to be more expensive than if you buy one. While this may be true if you’re just going to buy a computer to surf the web it’s not true for most people that use their computers for many tasks. A decent computer costs about $600 just for the tower. Many places will package it with a printer and a monitor for about $150 more. You can buy most of your computer components for less than that. Let’s compare the prices of the same components of a computer that you can buy to one that you can build.

To break it down a motherboard and a processor can go for about $150 on average. If you can find a good deal you might get it for even less. You can get the 2 gig of RAM that the other computer had for about $50 on sale. The tower you can get for about $50. A power supply with all of the other small components will run you about $80. This means that you’re spending $430 for virtually the same computer. If you invest another $70 you can get a graphics card that’s better than the onboard graphics that the other computer would have.

Most importantly the computer you build you can always upgrade later on. If you buy a computer it may come with all of the RAM slots filled (4 sticks of 512mb) where you would have to spend $150 to upgrade it. At that point it’s almost pointless to upgrade the old computer. However your computer that you built will be able to be upgraded just by buying 2 sticks of 2 gigs of RAM for $50 on sale.

Many people are lead to believe that the computer will be difficult to assemble and configure as well. If you already have a copy of Windows along with all of the programs that you normally use you won’t have much of a problem installing anything. A computer is as easy to assemble as a bookshelf that comes in a box that you buy at your local store. If you don’t have any software or a monitor and you don’t want to invest a lot of money into a computer then you may be better off buying a cheap computer from the store. However, most people want the best value for their money. The best way to do this is to buy your own internal computer components and build it yourself.