Was It Worth It?

[AustinTheIntern]

Yes, I saved a crap load of money building this computer myself. It was originally 2500$ using pcpartpicker, but through wise spending and searching around, it turned out to be 2000$ for me.

[slasher0161]

Most certainly but then again my other hobby is fixing cars and this rig was fairly cheap by quite a few peoples standards. However I have some big plans for it but they will have to wait for now because once again cars are sucking me dry (bloody $1300 AUD for rego and a set of tyres on a hatch back...). When I get the plans finalized on the upgrades though i'll post them up because i'm sure others will have input for silly things I will have glossed over.

[EChondo]

It's worth every cent and second of my time.

 

Wonderful experience and I am very happy that I built my own PC and have self taught myself as well. I'm potentially going to go into the Networking/Service Center/Help Desk career path because of it.

[threee6]

totaly worth it, even with the problems, such as the fact my new PSU 24 pin isn't long enough so i had to order an extension cable, ordering my new CPU tomorrow. it's already throwing up surprises like this >>>

(this is whilst using a athlon ii 250 dual core lol.

 

 

[Jozi]

I would change my psu, but other than that yes it was all worth it.

[Calavera]

Last week I've bought a G19 from Logitech... I kind of regret it - the thing was that I would have loved those applets that can be put into that little screen, sadly all applets have been removed from the internet it seems, all websites that contained them are removed somehow. For 140 bucks I could have bought something else that would have cool stuff too... =\

[TechTheWorld]

Yes. No regrets except that I didnt(dont) have more money to spend. I took 3 months planning my build.

[unidentical]

Totally worth it. I took time selecting my parts and the build went very well and it does everything I require it to.

[Guest]

Absolutely... it's just money after all.  lol.

 

I generally regret it 5 minutes after purchase and then never again.  Do I need what I have?  No.  Would I change a thing?  Not a chance.

You're one of the people I was hoping to see answer this. Just curious, is the TJ07 finally finished or are you still waiting on the powder coating?

[Aurorn]

Yep, every penny that I put into this PC has been worth it.

[gjrud]

Definitely worth it!

 

Reasons:

For over a year I was stuck with the laptop I used four years ago at the university, if I remember right it had an intel core 2 duo t6600, a GT 240M, 4Gb of RAM and a 230GB HDD. On top of being too slow to play anything good once I ended the University, it was prone to overheat so much to the point that since last September it started reaching the required temperature for automatic shutdown (100°C) in idle after 15 minutes at max.

To make it work I made a raised base for it and I stick 2 120mm fans optimized for high pressure (corsair one)

After noticing only minor improvements I disassembled it (a real pain I must say, also note that It was my first time, I hadn't disassembled even desktops back then), spent a day cleaning all the dust I could find, cleaned and then reapplied new thermal paste and then assembled it again.

The improvement were "major", but it would still crash for the temperature if I played anything for over half an hour.

 

Considered that I work with my computer the situation was pretty critical, so my parents decided to mail me my old one I had that they used on their tv, the specs are athlon 64 x2 4400+, GeForce 8400 GS, 2 GB RAM DDR2 and 130GB HDD.

It was a real improvement, but I couldn't fulfil my gaming needs with it, so I decided to purchase the list of parts that I made and modified over the past year and an half.

I must say that I got a really good price thanks to the fact that I spent so long checking out hardware websites (it would have been around 80-100€ more normally, 200+ more at my local shop).

 

It arrived three weeks ago.

 

CPU:  Intel Core i5-3470 3.2GHz Quad-Core Processor  €156.00

Motherboard:  ASRock Z75 Pro3 ATX  LGA1155 Motherboard  €68.28  

Memory:  Corsair Vengeance 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory  €57.09

Storage:  Seagate Barracuda 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive  €54.04

Video Card:  Gigabyte Radeon HD 7950 3GB Video Card  €253.88

Case:  Antec One ATX Mid Tower Case  €58.39

Power Supply:  XFX 550W 80 PLUS Bronze Certified ATX12V / EPS12V Power Supply  €53.77

Shipping €14.20

Total: €715.65

 

BTW the processor is "overclocked" at 3.8GHz on each core and the GPU is at 1150/1350MHz (seems stable, I noticed some weird stuff kinda like grunt frames on bioshock infinite when I moved the camera and fences were in sight, but it did the same at stock setting so whatever :D), too bad it's voltage locked. under full load the CPU's temperature is 68-74°C and the GPU is at 65°C.

 

PS: a small regret I have is that the shop where I ordered from wasn't on the list of shops that were supported by "Never Settle", so no free games with my card =( is there a way to bypass this? xD

[mjKneafsey]

My rig is about 3 years old and it still works fine. I do a lot less video rendering now than I did back then so if there's been any performance decrease I haven't felt it. It still does game well enough even on an HD6850 so yeah it's been worth it for me

[リチャード]

This didn't take me long to build really.

 

I was excited for an entire quarter of a year before I'd built it, waiting the upcoming birthday when I'd build it.

 

After finishing the build, I loved every morning just getting up and turning the computer on. I should mention that, before I got this computer in 2009, I had a really bad computer from like 2002 which lagged while watching 480p videos on Youtube. So that contrast made everything really huge for me.

 

This computer I have now has crashed on me several times each time almost reducing me to tears. Especially this one time when the primary drive crashed and I couldn't fix it for a week. Back then I thought the entire computer had broken, and not just the SSD.. which was why I got so sad about it. (That was.. I think two years ago.) And I also want to say that it's never worked perfectly. I always have one little problem which ruins the perfect experience. Right now being that Adobe Flash Player crashes constantly, just freezing up any videos I'm watching about every five minutes. And also, my primary drive is yet again starting to mess with me, this time because I can't update the firmware.

 

Despite all of the troubles. It's definitely worth it. I couldn't imagine going back to a 'below high end computer' (Though this is kind of mid-end right now.)

 

 

 

Because it's so worth it, I've decided to put even more money and effort into my next build. And if you spend more than 7h/day in front of the computer, then I advice you do the same... regardless of what you do on the computer when you use it. Heck, I'd spend $3000 on a computer I only want to watch movies on.

 

The thing is, I want to be able to do things. I want to have the option of doing whatever the h*ll I want to do. Right now I am really sad because over the last year I've figured out I can't record high quality videos with xSplit, because I lag to much while using xSplit & a game doing it. I am sad because I only have 6GB of memory, and can't have 2 games and a browser with 25tabs open at the same time.

 

There's in my mind, no way to overdo or overkill something you love. If you love computers, and all you want to do is gaming, some people will say that you don't need to spend more than $2000 to do it. And maybe that's true for some, but it will never be true for me.

[Samdb]

Coming from a laptop with integrated graphics, yes, very much so.

[ericlee30]

Looking back at my builds now, I would have to say, I do not regret spending tons of money on them, I would not take it back for the world, It's pretty cool having people come into your house and looking at all the Rigs I have built and have a WOW factor on their faces. It makes you feel really good on the inside and it makes you very proud of your hard work in making the rigs come together :) I take it more as an art peace then just a PC rig.

[felixbearpig]

yes .... you can say im in love

[rainbrodash666]

If I knew how it would turn out the only thing I would not do is rma my 5770, because my 5770 crossfire performed better than the 6850 I got back from my 5770, I would have fixed the noisy fan myself.

[deafboy]

You're one of the people I was hoping to see answer this. Just curious, is the TJ07 finally finished or are you still waiting on the powder coating?

 

lol. Still waiting on powder coating but that should be next week I think.  Actually had to drop some pieces off to get welded.  I really need my own welder :(

 

All in all though, it's certainly not a cheap option but it's certainly not terrible.  I think all said and done the case will be just under $500, I think. Not including the medical bills, LOL.

[Tr33]

*Looks at laptop that I bought that had 2 price cuts right after.*

 

Yeah.

*looks at laptop that cost a SHIT TON of money.* money i could use to buy even a pre bult that would probably run all games on ultra no problem.

 

Yeah

[deltamagna]

I built mine in July last year and it's still just as awesome as the day I built it...so yes, definitely worth it.

[Delaser]

Yup, worth it.
Just because I don't have to worry about games not working.

My build actually went very smooth. I consider myself lucky.

[DiamondRyce]

Yes. My intel celeron rig was under $265 beforehand and it was totally worth it. Then I went to amd fan day and got a free motherboard and apu. My build went up to like $400-500 pc. I am so happy it was worth waiting six hours in line for a free high end motherboard of the FM2 socket series. 

[SirReallySam]

Definitely worth it! I loved looking up the parts, I loved waiting for them to arrive, I loved putting it together and I love looking for things to improve upon it :) I also love using it. Then being like, ahhh yes my Sasha (name of my PC) I built you with my own two HANDS ! :D

[SirReallySam]

Yup, worth it.

Just because I don't have to worry about games not working.

My build actually went very smooth. I consider myself lucky.

agreed actually  :)

[EricX2]

Seeing how everything went flawlessly and I only used the money from my tax refund to buy it... heck yeah mine was worth it!

 

Every system I've ever built ended up being worth it, the systems I bought ended up feeling like a waste since there is ALWAYS something that isn't what I want. Picking all my own parts and having it exactly how I want feels so good. I haven't bought anything since my Dell Dimension 4100 which was a Pentium 3 800MHz Coppermine CPU... which was awesome back in 2000.