All my home PC's (six of them across the family) are home-built using components I researched and selected. The newest PC being an 8 core AMD FX-8350 with 32gb of ram. Two are my kids gaming machines (both AMD 8320's) with high-end graphic cards and SSD's.
The remaining three machines are 2 Intel Core 2 Quads running at 2.4ghz (both at least 7 years old< used to run some things around the house and my amateur radio station, and the last is an Intel i5 that's at least 5 years old.
Not a single component failure of any of them.
If you build something to last -- it will. When you use commodity parts (junk) like Dell, HP, Gateway, Asus, Lenovo, etc.. you can bet they're not going to last.
A long-time friend and I used to build custom, part-by-part, high-end units like yours, for ourselves and friends and our own businesses, but then we moved into RAID configurations for 2yrs.
Then back to off-the-shelf, high-end office-industrial units for 1/2 the price and we can get certain component replacements to up memory, graphics, but the rest of the essential and fast stuff is already there in the HP boxes.
If anything in the HP box needs to be changed, I have a local group of IT techs/repair guys, in their own business, who know their hardware and can replace, rebuild and upgrade. We shoot together semi-monthly and I send a lot of retail walk-in business their way. They’ve opened a 3rd store in February, so they’re doing well.
I kind of miss building into Lian Li boxes, but time constraints are what they are, nowadays. All of my units have lasted a l-o-n-g time, with regular monitoring, tune-ups and maintenance.
The remaining three machines are 2 Intel Core 2 Quads running at 2.4ghz (both at least 7 years old< used to run some things around the house and my amateur radio station, and the last is an Intel i5 that's at least 5 years old.
I'm in the same boat. No equipment failures. My needs are more modest so last fall assembled 2 Windows 7 computers. Win 8 does not bother me but I had the 2 Win7 licenses.
Haswell Pentium/8gb/Gigabyte mobo
Haswell i3/16gb/Asus mobo
I had the 2 power supplies which are years old w no problems.
Spent less than 500 dollars all together for 2 computers!
Pathetic Apple users have to spend minimum $1100 to buy a crappy 13" laptop
Mac mini forces the beggars to grovel for 4gb memory. You have lay out more coin to go 8gb. Prolly can't handle 16
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