Prebuilt Computers: Understanding Prices to Protect Yourself as a Consumer

If you're in the market for a new computer and can't build it yourself, it pays to understand a bit about the parts that go into a computer, and what the going rate is for the parts in any particular machine you might be looking at buying.

Buying a pre-built computer is fine if you choose the right one. They often come with sub-standard parts — particularly in important areas like the power supply — but you can find good options. Shops tend to charge anywhere from $50 upwards of $200 for putting it together, with $100 being about average.

Some shops border on the ridiculous though. As an example, here is an advertisement on gumtree for a pre-built computer (google cache link in case the ad disappears). Here's a list of the parts included in the computer, with approximate "going rate" prices for each of the parts that can be purchased locally in South Australia:

• CPU: Intel i3 6100 $160
• Motherboard: unknown, assume middling H110 $90
• RAM: 8GB DDR4 2133MHz $50
• HDD: WD 1TB $70
• ODD: DVD-RW $20
• Case: Coolermaster K282 $60
• PSU: Corsair VS350 $50
• OS: Win 10 Home $140

That comes to $640. The price being asked? $1149! That's nearly double the retail price of the parts, or a build fee of $500.

That's a very expensive deal. Don't get caught with stuff like this.

What Can Twenty Bucks Buy You These Days?

What can $20 buy you these days? In the second hand "box of random IT stuff" department, it seems like quite a lot.

I'd been looking around for a cheap low profile graphics card for a while to get an old PC up and running again. Eventually found one offered on the much-maligned-but-often-useful^† site gumtree.

I found a guy listing a GT220 along with a box of "random stuff" for $20. So I went to pick it up, and was amazed at what I found in this treasure trove. Among the items (keep in mind I really only wanted to graphics card) I discovered:

• The GT220 graphics card (of course)
• USB TV tuner with aerial and coax adapter
• Brand new unopened Display Port cable
• DVI and VGA cables and adapters
• PCI wireless card (54Mbps — old and slow, but whatever)
• SATA/Molex adapter cables
• Case fan and other 3/4-pin fan adapters
• Coax splitter and cable
• AEC power cables
• Various USB adapters and extenders
• RJ45 network cables
• Modem/telephony/RJ11 cables and adapters
• A smattering of modular power supply cables (from an unknown power supply ;)
• IDE cables (blastus from the pastus)
• A whole bunch of audio cables
• A whole bunch of audio adapter like 3.5mm <-> 6.5mm adapters)
• A UPS (wtf?). Probably bad battery, but still
• A label maker (again...wtf?)
• Random RAM sticks of various (old and most likely useless) denominations
• A whole bunch of other stuff I couldn't even identify

The trove...some of it at least, already nabbed the best parts

Now, I probably won't ever use much from this smorgasbord of geek hardware wet dream. The funny thing is that many of the parts — like the DP cable, coax cable, USB tuner, USB extension, coax splitters, etc. — I've actually bought previously. So I know they're useful. Just don't know if they'll be useful to me again. Pot luck at its best though!

_{† Maligned because while you get the occasional good transaction (like I did in this case) you also get a lot of time wasters, low-ballers, overpriced, over-bearing, clueless kind of people on both the buyer and seller side.}