The Worst Prebuilt PC Mistakes We've Seen (So Far)
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Date: 2021-09-29
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Comments and reviews: 10
Zaekyr
I used to buy prebuilt in the 90's. Back then they weren't so bad. I bought an alienware in 2003 and had nothing but problems with it (power supply failed in first year, they replaced it, graphics card a couple months later, they replaced it, then system failure during third year). I built my latest PC's and the peace of mind was revolutionary. Buying parts individually is only more expensive if the prebuilts you might be looking at actually use parts of equal quality. The PC I am currently using had no prebuilt comparable and the closest one I found would have cost me 300 more than I paid. Prebuilts ALWAYS skimp on the parts somewhere to expand profit. Build your own, if your uncomfortable about it get help from a friend or family member, or family members friend, or local shop. Prebuilts are barely good enough for web browsing and are for people that buy computers to play cards or sudooku.
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I used to buy prebuilt in the 90's. Back then they weren't so bad. I bought an alienware in 2003 and had nothing but problems with it (power supply failed in first year, they replaced it, graphics card a couple months later, they replaced it, then system failure during third year). I built my latest PC's and the peace of mind was revolutionary. Buying parts individually is only more expensive if the prebuilts you might be looking at actually use parts of equal quality. The PC I am currently using had no prebuilt comparable and the closest one I found would have cost me 300 more than I paid. Prebuilts ALWAYS skimp on the parts somewhere to expand profit. Build your own, if your uncomfortable about it get help from a friend or family member, or family members friend, or local shop. Prebuilts are barely good enough for web browsing and are for people that buy computers to play cards or sudooku.
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Neo_182
Back in the days of NCIX, i ordered a pre-built from them with two XFX branded 6970's.
I had problems with random freezing since i received it.
Much later (after warranty expired) i found out that both cards had been flashed with 6990's bios and whomever built that system forgot to flash back or flip the dual bios switch.
That system was such a pain in the ass and cost me so much time with RMA's and such.
XFX sent me 7870's as compensation. But those were open ended coolers. By that time i had purchased a Z77 sabertooth (with the neat black shield) come to find out those 7870's were spraying bearing oil ALL over my system.
Needless to say i swore off XFX after all that.
...And i went back to building my own systems. Never buying a prebuilt again.
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Back in the days of NCIX, i ordered a pre-built from them with two XFX branded 6970's.
I had problems with random freezing since i received it.
Much later (after warranty expired) i found out that both cards had been flashed with 6990's bios and whomever built that system forgot to flash back or flip the dual bios switch.
That system was such a pain in the ass and cost me so much time with RMA's and such.
XFX sent me 7870's as compensation. But those were open ended coolers. By that time i had purchased a Z77 sabertooth (with the neat black shield) come to find out those 7870's were spraying bearing oil ALL over my system.
Needless to say i swore off XFX after all that.
...And i went back to building my own systems. Never buying a prebuilt again.
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Kyle
Hey GN! I have a very weird question. Since I bought my ROG g15cs, it has had horrible hanging up. For several months I just made do with it. However, it started hanging up 3 times back to back for about 5 seconds each which of course causes me to lose all of my games. I randomly found a setting called hardware accelerated gpu scheduling and enabled that, then found the power mode for my gpu, turned the power saver off, and haven't had this issue since. Can you explain what happened? I7 9700f, 2070 super, g15cs main board. This was a prebuilt. Was the original gpu scheduling faulty? I just need to figure out the actual issue so i don't face it again. ROG was absolutely no help in this process and I spent 6 months trying to work with them.
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Hey GN! I have a very weird question. Since I bought my ROG g15cs, it has had horrible hanging up. For several months I just made do with it. However, it started hanging up 3 times back to back for about 5 seconds each which of course causes me to lose all of my games. I randomly found a setting called hardware accelerated gpu scheduling and enabled that, then found the power mode for my gpu, turned the power saver off, and haven't had this issue since. Can you explain what happened? I7 9700f, 2070 super, g15cs main board. This was a prebuilt. Was the original gpu scheduling faulty? I just need to figure out the actual issue so i don't face it again. ROG was absolutely no help in this process and I spent 6 months trying to work with them.
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Tek_Lynx
DELL and HP along with some now non existent oem's in the past would use ATX 20 and 24pin standard headers but with a different pinout, so if you plugged a standard PSU into those systems you fried it, or vice versa took that PSU out and tried to use it in a normal machine. They stopped doing that went to these werido headers now, so that is a plus if you think about it that way. Atleast you won't fry another mobo with em. It was always something you had to be aware about when working on them. Oh and it wasn't consistent, one OEM machine from the same company would be completely ATX standard, while another model in basically the same case would not be. Really messed up.
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DELL and HP along with some now non existent oem's in the past would use ATX 20 and 24pin standard headers but with a different pinout, so if you plugged a standard PSU into those systems you fried it, or vice versa took that PSU out and tried to use it in a normal machine. They stopped doing that went to these werido headers now, so that is a plus if you think about it that way. Atleast you won't fry another mobo with em. It was always something you had to be aware about when working on them. Oh and it wasn't consistent, one OEM machine from the same company would be completely ATX standard, while another model in basically the same case would not be. Really messed up.
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Pierr
Only time i bought a pre built was last year when we got my brothers work/semi gaming pc.It arrived doa.Opened it up and everything was cable tied in the middle of the case and nothing plugged in.Windows was on the ssd meaning they don't even test the ssd that goes with the pc to see if it works.It's fine for me because i know what i am doing but what if it shipped to some old couple that doesn't know anything.It came from far away and cost a lot of money for shipping.
I did send them an email with that concern and they didn't even have the decency to reply.
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Only time i bought a pre built was last year when we got my brothers work/semi gaming pc.It arrived doa.Opened it up and everything was cable tied in the middle of the case and nothing plugged in.Windows was on the ssd meaning they don't even test the ssd that goes with the pc to see if it works.It's fine for me because i know what i am doing but what if it shipped to some old couple that doesn't know anything.It came from far away and cost a lot of money for shipping.
I did send them an email with that concern and they didn't even have the decency to reply.
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George
Its funny you say that about Cyberpower Re CPU cooler . I bought a prebuild in the UK about 8 years ago FX8350 and I was running it without really looking at benchmarks etc then when I looked at the temps when i got more into the Tech side of things. It was running at 90c after Very Light gaming workloads. Turns out they installed the AMD Stock cooler for the FX 4000 series. I brought this to there attention and they refused to do anything about it so I had to in the end just upgrade it myself - certainly wouldn't recommend.
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Its funny you say that about Cyberpower Re CPU cooler . I bought a prebuild in the UK about 8 years ago FX8350 and I was running it without really looking at benchmarks etc then when I looked at the temps when i got more into the Tech side of things. It was running at 90c after Very Light gaming workloads. Turns out they installed the AMD Stock cooler for the FX 4000 series. I brought this to there attention and they refused to do anything about it so I had to in the end just upgrade it myself - certainly wouldn't recommend.
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Viced
Not sure if companies still do this, but one of my favourite things to find when I used to work at a computer refurbishing shop were PCs from companies that would charge you to upgrade to front USB.
100% of the time, the front USB was already there, just covered by either a sticker, or a bit of plastic.
A lot of the time, this front USB was actually hooked up properly to the motherboard, so they were literally charging people 50 to pop a small panel off the front of their PC.
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Not sure if companies still do this, but one of my favourite things to find when I used to work at a computer refurbishing shop were PCs from companies that would charge you to upgrade to front USB.
100% of the time, the front USB was already there, just covered by either a sticker, or a bit of plastic.
A lot of the time, this front USB was actually hooked up properly to the motherboard, so they were literally charging people 50 to pop a small panel off the front of their PC.
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Anders
Was asked to 'fix slow pc' a few years ago. An already, at that time, ancient pre-built. Quickly discovered that it was running out of memory. Popped side panel off to discover that it had 2 sticks of 2gb ram, but only one of them were inserted correctly. Snapped second one in place and the pc ran significantly better. Easiest bucks I ever made. Worst part is that the pc had been like that forever, from the factory.
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Was asked to 'fix slow pc' a few years ago. An already, at that time, ancient pre-built. Quickly discovered that it was running out of memory. Popped side panel off to discover that it had 2 sticks of 2gb ram, but only one of them were inserted correctly. Snapped second one in place and the pc ran significantly better. Easiest bucks I ever made. Worst part is that the pc had been like that forever, from the factory.
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Afbuster
Bloatware really is the worst offender, mostly because it affects laptops too _and_ creates obnoxious user-experience. And some of the UWP-compatible stuff or some shit seems to be infecting the system so deeply it will return on bigger Windows updates or creating new user. It can't be over-stated how much of a malware-like behaviour it all represents.
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Bloatware really is the worst offender, mostly because it affects laptops too _and_ creates obnoxious user-experience. And some of the UWP-compatible stuff or some shit seems to be infecting the system so deeply it will return on bigger Windows updates or creating new user. It can't be over-stated how much of a malware-like behaviour it all represents.
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Michael
Given the recent uptick in the 'how many cores do you need' debate, do you think you could find a pre-built with a 10850k/10900k, a 3070/6800 or better, and 32GB of decent RAM that comes with a ton of bloatware so you can do tests with 6/8/10 cores at fixed clocks at both 16GB and 32GB of RAM and see how much difference background tasks can have?
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Given the recent uptick in the 'how many cores do you need' debate, do you think you could find a pre-built with a 10850k/10900k, a 3070/6800 or better, and 32GB of decent RAM that comes with a ton of bloatware so you can do tests with 6/8/10 cores at fixed clocks at both 16GB and 32GB of RAM and see how much difference background tasks can have?
reply
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