Building a Gaming PC vs. Buying a Prebuilt Gaming Desktop

This is a hotly debated topic in the community. We’re very aware. If you go look at a video on any PC Gaming YouTube channel that highlights pre-built PC’s (including our own), you’ll find the comments section flooded with hardware geeks yelling that you should build your own PC instead of buy. But there are certainly merits to both approaches that warrant examination, and today, I’m going to break down the reasons why you should build your PC and the reasons why you shouldn’t.

Reasons to Build your Gaming PC

The first reason you should build your Gaming PC is that it can be cheaper.

Especially if you’re just starting out and you only have, say $200 to spend on a gaming PC, building is going to be the only way you’ll be able to get something that will play games for that amount of money. You’ll be cutting corners and finding ways to hit that budget that wouldn’t be feasible or possible for a pre-built manufacturer to replicate at scale. The larger your budget increases, the more likely it gets that you can find a pre-built PC that’s just as good or better than something you could build on your own due to parts market volatility and manufacturers being able to secure bulk pricing with OEMs.

The second reason you should build your Gaming PC is that you can customize it to your heart’s desire at the time of purchase.

Don’t get me wrong, pre-builts can be customized as well, but you have to do it after you get the system, and if there’s something you don’t want in a pre-built system, you just have to suck it up most of the time. When you build your own PC, you get the flexibility to put whatever you want into it and omit whatever you want to omit. If you’re not looking for fancy lights, you can just get a black box. If you want 20TB of storage, you can get 20TB of storage. The sky is truly the limit, and the bottom is truly rock bottom.

The third reason you should build your gaming PC is if it’s fun for you.

There are a lot of people that build PCs in their free time as a hobby. I’m one of those people myself, and if you’re one of those people, then yes, you should probably build your gaming PC. A lot of people get real satisfaction from doing the research, gathering their build piece-by-piece, and putting it together and seeing those lights come on for the first time. There’s a sense of a weight being lifted off of your shoulders -- a certain euphoria -- as soon as you see that BIOS splash-screen for the first time. But buyer beware -- sometimes that BIOS splash screen doesn’t show when you press the power button for the first time, but I’ll go more in-depth with that in a bit.

Reasons to Buy a Pre-Built Gaming PC

The first reason you should buy a pre-built gaming PC is that you get a full-system warranty.

With Periphio systems, you get a full 1-year system warranty. Whenever you decide to build your own PC, you don’t get a full system warranty, but instead are relegated to dealing with the warranties of individual components. Granted, some of those can be longer than 1-year, but the fact is that if something goes wrong, it’s up to you to troubleshoot what the problem part is, track down the original box for proof of purchase (if you kept it at all), and issue an RMA request with that manufacturer. This process is tedious, time-consuming, and maybe downright impossible for someone who lacks a full understanding of the internals of a computer, and the difficulty of this situation is further compounded by the COVID-19 crisis and the fact that many company’s customer service teams are operating on a barebones basis right now.

The second reason you should buy a pre-built gaming PC is that building is time-consuming.

If you’ve never built a computer before, you might go to YouTube and watch a video and say “that looks really easy, I could do that in a couple of hours”. While it’s certainly possible to build a computer in under a couple of hours, if you’ve never done it before, the process is going to be much longer than that. The longest step of putting together any build is research. At Periphio, our R&D team has put hundreds of hours into developing and validating our systems to ensure they’re compatible, stable, and reliable. Whenever I’m putting together a new build for myself or a friend, I oftentimes spend up to 15 hours on research alone ensuring the parts I’m looking at are going to perform optimally, will be compatible with each other, and will play the games I want to play. With your Periphio system, that process has already been done.

The third reason you should buy a pre-built gaming PC is that you don’t have to be technical.

If you’re someone who just enjoys playing games, odds are you’re not going to want to build your PC. Building hardware and software technical skills can take years, and if you’re someone who’s trying to transition from consoles to the PC gaming community, you’re likely used to a plug-and-play experience. That’s what buying a pre-built from Periphio gets you. It gets you a system that has been benchmarked so you can be certain it will play the games you want to play at the settings you want to play them at. It gets you a single technical support number you can call at any time for no charge and they’ll be ready to help you with any issues you might be having.

The Verdict: Pre-Built Takes the Cake

There are a lot of reasons why someone would want to build their PC, but as a whole experience, buying pre-built is just better. Even if it happens to be more expensive (most of the time it’s not), the time you save, the peace-of-mind you get, and the overall experience as a consumer are the reasons why we think you should buy a pre-built. Having the ability to call a customer support line and having a single unified system warranty are things we consider invaluable if you’re not particularly interested in getting technical, and especially if you’re transitioning from an Xbox or Playstation, they’re necessities. A lot of people just want to play games. They don’t want to get their hands dirty with learning 82 different combinations of motherboards and processors, and they certainly don’t care why their system won’t turn on after they’ve just built it from all brand-new parts. They just want things to work, and that’s who Periphio is for.

If you’re looking to buy pre-built, be sure you check out our line of Periphio renewed hybrid gaming PC’s and join the Periphio family today.

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