[circlecity]

"but you know who the manufacturers of the parts are and have some idea of the quality."

But when you dig into it you find its the same motherboard companies building the mb for the Dells of the world as selling them off the shelf. Dell just got a few million dollars worth of bad ones instead of one. It just got too expensive to build them for me. I can buy a good pc off the shelf and upgrade the video card a lot cheaper than building it. And without the hassle.

[throwback]

Really? Maybe it has to do with the type of PC you're dealing with. I spent about $1300 for parts for a halfway decent gaming rig about 6 months ago. I found to get the same type of parts would have run about $1k more to buy it pre-assembled from someone. Of course it's tough to find an exact comparable among assemblers like Dell because they throw a bunch of things in you don't want. What you say may be true for a lower end, conventional machine, though. I bought a pair of fairly nice video cards; the box screams and I didn't think I could get anything like that for less than $2500. I try to run the suckers forever too. My last two were both about 7 years old before I replaced them. Never had a bad part either. Weird. I've destroyed parts through my own stupidity, though.