That depends on what type of machine that you are planning to build. I have put together a lot of desktops over the years; I used purchase the parts and assemble them for friends. These days it is very difficult to match a good Costco special. For example:
Black Friday Deal
iBUYPOWER TraceMesh 7 Gaming Desktop - 14th Gen Intel Core i7-14700F - GeForce RTX 4060 - Windows 11 - 32 GB RAM - 2TB SSD - Black
Item 1815274
Model TMI7N4601
Online Price $1,199.99
Less $200.00
Your Price $999.99
Sometimes I have 2 browsers and 300 tabs open. My minimum computer requirements are—
NVME drive
16GB ram
CPU with passmark score of 10,000
Windows 11
What I am using right now has all the above and an 15-8400 CPU from last quarter of 2017. Actual passmark score is 9234
I had seen that on Amazon as I was researching- I wanted though a machine where the bios wasn’t crippled, and the parts were premium- not oem. For the average person though, that is a great price, under $1 grand.
My requirement was a motherboard and cpu that is “future proof”, not so much to benefit me, but whoever comes after me, ie nephew or niece I suppose. So I went with an asus motherboard that has thunderbolt 5, which has read speed of 120 mb/s compared to 20 gb for thunderbolt 4- I also wanted pcie 5 which is a massive increase in speed as well for future products
I will likely,never need the speed, but I remember back when we bought our first comp for $3500, and thinking “I’ll never need more than 500 mb hard drive lol. I was using floppy disks, 1.4 mb, to put game trials on (not full,games, but the trials to see if I liked them)
My current 1 terabyte drive is chokerblock full right now- gotta upgrade it to 2 tb lol.
I went back and forth with the decision to buy pre-made or custom built with components I wanted- my end decision was made on the fact that i have never had things like boats, snowmobiles, motorcycles, campers etc, and im older now and spend most of the time in house, so the comp is something I enjoy and use a lot- not very frugal I suppose, but in the end it may be as I won’t have to update anytime soon
System is;
—Asus creator pro motherboard w pcie5 and thunderbolt 5
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DGW9S82G?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title
—intel i-7 ultra
(I’ve read the non ultras have been having a bit of problem with performance issues- maybe the ultra does too, but we will see)
—water cooler cpu cooler
—GeForce 4060ti
—32 ddr5 mgb ram 6000 mhz
—2 2tb drives
—Coolermaster case (which I hate th3 new cases, but I can modify to suit my needs, and do away with the stupid lights they include)
—850 power supply
I was about $1500 less than previous pre-built machines, usually around $3500 when all the custom choices were added to their pre-built customization choices- I always went overboard for sure, but back then I was heavy into photoshop and photography and computer art, so I opted for upgraded graphics and ram and such. Th3se days though, a $1000 comp just blows my previous builds out of the water- way more computer for far less money these days.
Read8ng through the comments on that ibuypower computer, it looks like they do have premium parts, not oem parts- which is cool. The only downside for me though is the motherboard, cpu and vid card- I opted for the 4060ti 16gb card on my build.