Build your own vs Prebuilt

[mrbios]

Just after some figures to get a general idea of what other schools are doing so thought i would start a poll on this...

 

We build our own from motherboard bundles, we ask for a spec, they send us a bundle (cpu/mobo/ram) then we buy other parts like hdd, case, psu seperately, generally i've found this to be a lot cheaper than buying prebuilt PCs but 6 years ago they used to buy all prebuilt PCs here, they have now all been replaced (got rid of the very last one today ) with our DIYs, it's obviously a lot less work to buy prebuilts though so i can see why some would do it that way, how do you do it?

Edited May 19, 2010 by mrbios

[Soulfish]

When I started last year all PCs had been self-built. None of them had windows OEM licenses (and so the select upgrade licenses weren't valid!) and cheap components were used. These cheap components have caused us real problems - we run at about a 20% failure rate and with 1yr warranties on most of the components everything is out of warranty.

 

Given the time to build everything, the support costs and the windows licensing costs it;s just cheaper and easier for us to buy pre-built dell/HP machines.

[featured_spectre]

Prebuilt unbranded here (such as Ruby)...reason being they offer 3 year next day on site warranty with everything they build as standard, and the warranty is new for old...can't argue with that!

 

Plus the same machines we asked dell and ruby for, ruby came in at around £30 cheaper than dell per unit, plus dell wanted £50 on top per machine for the 3 year next day on site warranty, which over a class of 30 units, is quite a bit of cash! Also we didn't want to have to wait for ages being on the phone to run through tech support generic questions. Ruby ted to think that if you work in a school in the ICT dept, you can generally diagnose hardware failures!

 

If you want the number for ruby (well the parent company that own them, and whom I do some deals with) give me a PM!

[srochford]

I think if you do a proper cost comparison you might well find that he pre-built work out cheaper. Your time costs a lot of money and unless you only have a small number of computers then the money spent on building and repairing can easily be more than the cost of buying standard PCs.

 

It's not easy to be accurate with the cost comparison. For example, you need to include something to act as a warranty cost and it's hard to estimate in advance how many of your machines will fail inside the 3 years where HP, Dell etc will replace the components but outside the 1 year which your components probably have as a warranty.

[mrbios]

I think if you do a proper cost comparison you might well find that he pre-built work out cheaper. Your time costs a lot of money and unless you only have a small number of computers then the money spent on building and repairing can easily be more than the cost of buying standard PCs.

 

It's not easy to be accurate with the cost comparison. For example, you need to include something to act as a warranty cost and it's hard to estimate in advance how many of your machines will fail inside the 3 years where HP, Dell etc will replace the components but outside the 1 year which your components probably have as a warranty.

 

Hard drives have a 3 year warranty

Power supplies 2 years

Motherboard bundles im unsure but i'd expect it's around 3 years, it's easy enough for us to get a replacement after a couple of years from our regular supplier

 

As for time costs we consider our budget to be a far tighter asset than our time, time we can find and generally have a fair bit of when it comes to planned work, but our budget is tight for the size of the school and needs to be spent wisely, i don't tend to think of time as much of a cost.

[broc]

Commercial pre-built systems supplied by DELL or similar have standard components & good driver support & makes re-imaging more easy.

 

I inherited a network of 'mongrel' PCs when I took over & we had to virtually hand-build each system because of the variety of system boards, network adapters & graphics they had. We switched to commercial systems and can now handle 200+ desktops with maybe 3-4 images.....

[ICT_GUY]

For school go pre built, when they fail you can slope shoulders to the company that supplied you. Build them yourself and SMT will for ever blame you for everything. The cost difference is usually in favour of prebuilt PC's anyway.

[tmcd35]

I've voted for pre-built branded, but has we move more towards using multiseat systems we are looking more at building our own since it can be both expensive and difficult to get the spec 100% right for these systems using manufacture generic boxes.

[bossman]

Prebuilt branded Dell for our servers.

 

Prebuilt unbranded for our workstations which use branded internals (intel, corsair, elixer, WD, Seagate etc).

 

Adopted standalone system with remnants of CC2.4.

[DevilsAdvocate]

We use pre-built Dell machines. Though we do have a couple of rooms running custom self-builds. It's just easier all round really to buy pre-built machines.

[K.C.Leblanc]

Mostly Stone and HP machines here. We haven't built anything inhouse for about 4 years.

[buzzard]

Dell and HP here, for us it came down to price. When I did quick calcs a few years ago in a previous post pre built came in a bit cheaper (not that much though) but it was good when we bought laptops for all staff (around the time of SIMS.net coming out) as our time was really taken up with supporting 250+ of those, it was nice to pick up the phone and pass all hardware faults over. If we could have had another Technician, we'd have tipped over to self built but as there was no chance of that we just fought for a bigger budget seling the idea af a formal rolling replacemnet that we'd done and taken to goveners etc.

[webman]

@bossman: Don't forget to mention the 5 year on-site warranty

[tmcd35]

The biggest argument against building your own is time. Can't say I'd relish the idea of building a complete suite of 30 PC's. I have enough problem finding the time/motivation to build an OS image on from 1 OEM PC without having to go to the trouble of physically building 30 PC's from components.

 

There are time being able to build your own is useful, but a lot of the time it's an hassle I'd could do without.

[webman]

tmcd35 makes a very good point - what is your total cost of ownership for the lifetime of each of those DIY computers?

 

Pre-built: initial unit cost, warranty usually included, and you don't have to worry about it yourself. Sometimes includes Windows licenses. None of your time (which costs money) is taken getting it to a working state.

 

DIY: initial component cost. Warranties on parts - a year? Windows license may be bought as OEM? Your time is taken up when building (up to 30 mins per machine?), and also further on down the line when you are required to carry out repairs yourself. If you leave, who is responsible?

[Tyiell]

Pre-built to our specs here. I don't doubt that it would be worth finding parts individually and building pcs in a small school, but in a school our size (1500 kids, nearly 200 staff) it's not really practical. In addition to the time and warrantly issues pointed out, it is also helpful to have all the computers as similar as possible throughout the school - ours are all HP or Viglen. That way once they are out of warranty, parts are interchangeable and the machines are standard...

[3s-gtech]

Generally pre-built HPs here, I built a small suite of 7 PCs from parts as I needed power on a budget, and for the cost of some pre-built Celeron machines I got Phenom II X4s with 4GB RAM etc etc. Generally I don't have the time though, and the warranties and ease of imaging win over.

[mrbios]

DIY: initial component cost. Warranties on parts - a year? Windows license may be bought as OEM? Your time is taken up when building (up to 30 mins per machine?), and also further on down the line when you are required to carry out repairs yourself. If you leave, who is responsible?

 

As i've pointed out earlier, warrantys are generally 2 years minimum, mainly 3 years, pretty much the same as what you would get with a prebuilt PC, the windows licensing is all done via MVLS which is about £25per pc, as for carrying out repairs yourself i don't see why this is a problem....

 

If a prebuilt dies, do you take it out of the classroom, ring up a company to collect it/post it back and then have them send out a new one? so the teacher has no PC for a day or two? Generally if a PC dies - and 99.9% of the time it's a power supply or hard drive, we just wip one out, whack a new one in, image it and we're done in no more than 30minutes

 

As for 30 minutes to build a PC, it may just be due to the sheer amount of them i've built working here, but we can get 10 built in an hour between 2 of us and have them connected up and imaging pretty easily.

[nicholab]

You are never going to be able to build 300 PC in realistic time frame. That is the number of machine we are going to be replacing soon. Also your time is highly valuable.

[xenonive]

We have half and half , I have work experience students in 3 - 4 times a year and find building pc's in house a great addition to their learning plan , as for quality control we make sure to watch over them and make them extra cautious about handling components but once trained can build about 8 machines a day fully including image . They learn and become confident about building pc's and we get someone to make them for free over 2 weeks.

[webman]

@mrbios We have a small pool of spare machines which we can just swap out in around 5 minutes. Depending on the failure, we either have the failed component sent to us via next day courier or the supplier send an engineer.

 

Because everything is all standard hardware (no proprietary Dell motherboards/PSUs ) in our workstations, we have the option of supporting it ourselves once out of warranty if we feel a machine is still up to the job.

[Griff]

We have prebuilt unbranded machines from PARS Technology which are built to our spec and I can't fault them.

[xenonive]

Also have PARS machines with 5 year warrenty and had a couple DOA but other than that they have caused no problems .

[john]

We have a bit of a mixed bag, some pre-built from HP, some pre-built from two different local firms and the odd one custom made for a set job. I am moving more towards pre-built from HP as the stuff from the local firms just isn't worth it, the warranty sucks, they maybe cheap but its day to get parts, you get rude engineers and they are just not interested. Plus by using big name kit seems to go down better with those at the top seeing a HP box in a classroom rather than generic random box from Y.

 

I also find that spares are easier to get for longer with big names like HP. We have some PCs from a local firm and they are out of warranty but can I find a main board for them! Pah! The same thing when they were in warranty as well they never were swapped the boards like for like, I had a go at them over it and said to them that it was silly why do we spec a set board when they change it from an expensive one to a cheap one etc. They did apologise and said they would review there procedure.

 

Lesson learnt though, small firms really don't pay to use anymore I am finding.

[RTFM]

I just dont see the benefit of building your own compared to the advantages and ease (and price now a days!) of pre-built. Especially when you can get 5 year warranties now for not much extra price per machine. Maybe thats just my thinking due to the fact our ICT team isnt particularly large (3 of us in a school of 1200~ pupils and 150~ staff).