Wow, that will put a dent in custom DAW PC builders business !

https://www.reviewgeek.com/91503/newegg-now-builds-and-delivers-custom-pcs/

Jeff

Yes, absolutely. I’ve built all my computers since 1983 but this looks very attractive.

And I’m a big fan of NewEgg, with one exception: they have increased considerably the use of third-party suppliers, including many from China with long delivery times. I try to buy only when it comes from NewEgg.

The $99 build price is OK I guess. That would require buying everything from them.

For me I don't see any great advantage. The last i9 build took less than two hours. I bought parts from them and two other vendors. They are not likely to set up windows the way you want it.

The time is installing all the software programs.

I like NewEgg OK but their delivery time is pretty slow at times. They generally have better prices and selection than many other places. We don't have Micro Center or other large stores here in Miami.

Billy

I used Fry's because there was one just a few miles from me in LA until they went under last year. After I retired and bought a house 125 miles away I bought all the components from Fry's for my new business desktop. Long story short I went through 3 bad brand new mobo's and yes I know all about checking the packaging to make sure they were not simply restocked.

The third time I took them up on their $85 offer to put it together while I waited. This was a two week process because I had to wait until I needed to drive into LA again and swapped mobo's and then back home discover that one was also bad. Their tech went through another bad mobo and he said they had no more left so he used a very similar gaming version which cost me an extra twenty bucks but was good.

After talking at length to the tech who did the assembly he said this happens all the time as in ALL THE TIME. The QC coming out of China has gotten much worse over the last few years. No way will I be ordering parts online, spend a couple hours putting it all together and all I get are boot errors when I'm sitting here in the boonies with no one to yell at.

Thanks for posting this, I'll be using NewEgg and be happy to pay them $95 because that makes all the bad new parts their problem and yeah, I can see that can increase the delivery time. As it was it took me pretty much all day at Fry's because first the tech tested the mobo I returned to verity it was bad which it was, then he discovered the last one they had left was also bad before he used the gaming one.

Bob

Hi Bob,

Any new part from anyone can fail and does so more often then we would like. The delivery time on a new system from NewEgg could be pretty fast if they have all the parts in stock.

The only failures I have ever had was because of bad motherboards.

It could be worth the $99 dollars just to not have to deal with that issue.

I have several computers so I am not often in any hurry to build a new one.

All my high end machines work great except for the Microsoft intrusive issues. The last Lap Top, an HP at about $1200 was a piece of crap until I installed a SSD and a new operating system.

I always use https://pcpartpicker.com/ to look for the best prices and what is compatible.

By the way...living in the boonies is no excuse for not raising hell with venders...lol

Billy

Our office computer that we run Quick Books on has a backup machine ready to go and can be changed over in less than 10 min.

To illustrate how important security has become for MS, I just saw this:

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/12/microsoft-acquires-riskiq-a-security-software-provider.html

Win 10 was a huge upgrade regarding security and no doubt Win 11 will be the same with the proper chips. Initial testing is showing it's already faster than Win 10 and 10 is faster than 7. Edge is now basically Chrome because of security.

Any one individual user won't make any difference but the whole worldwide ecosystem of Windows machines needs to tighten up in order to stop or at least slow down these huge government sponsored hacker farms in Russia, China, India, N. Korea and all the other wonderful places they like to congregate in. And as a country we need to start busting some chops over this, I hope Biden is doing that.

Bob

Many years ago, when I took a day job as a CATV field engineer, we burned everything on a test desk for 48 hours or more if we had the time.

Occasionally, components would fail in the burn-in period. If they made it through the burn in, they would go out in the field and be installed on a utility pole or ground level locker.

It just seems that every once in a while a resistor, capacitor, coil, or IC would fail during the break in period. If it made it through that, it was probably reliable.

Much easier to replace something before it hangs on a utility pole 18 feet in the air.

So when building your own PC, I suspect there will be an occasional failure of components. It just comes with the territory.

Notes

I was pretty excited about the possibility of getting New Egg to assemble my newest PC so I sat down and wrote out each individual component that I wanted. Considering that I’m at an age where this may well be my last built from scratch PC, I designed a beast and went to New Egg to place my order, but that was when reality set in. To be fair, New Egg said in their announcement that all components might not be available but that is not the half of what the issues are. Okay, I was willing to step down to a GPU that was inferior to the one on my wish list, but to rub salt in the wound New Egg places limits on the number of items you can order depending I guess NOT on how many they have in stock, but the scarcity on the market. I not only was limited to one GPU but was limited to 2 RAM sticks even though the Motherboard I was ordering could hold 8. Ditto with the SSD I wanted to order 3 of, one to a customer, and the HDDs: I wanted 4 AND THE limit was 2. Bought what I could from New Egg and between Amazon and a few other websites ordered everything I needed and assembled it myself. I guess at least I saved $99.

And, if you were going to spend the money with them anyway, nothing is stopping you from buying and building it yourself if you choose to, right?

What you described sounded like that once in a lifetime deal on a muffler for $9.99, and when you get there with a vanilla make and model car, somehow that $9.99 special doesn't fit your car. Talk about bait and switch!

Right; however, their purchasing limits are across the board for many of their items; not just specific to their build offers. So if they say one Nvidia GPU to a customer that means ONE to a customer whether you are building it yourself or asking them to build it for you. The interesting thing is that the other companies that I went to placed no such purchasing limits on the things that I ordered. In fact, I actually got a discount at one place for making multiple orders of an item.

Oh man. That's an awful business practice! I have never heard of anybody saying "We will only sell you LESS products and take LESS of your money." I haven't looked to them for anything in years so I'll take your word for it. But that's a true "wow" moment to hear that.

If you order a motherboard, two sticks of RAM, a CPU, a GPU, and one SSD and they make that work, then adding anything else is a snap.

You are absolutely right Matt, but I couldn’t even get them to sell me the GPU that I wanted. They were only willing to give me a step-down from the one I wanted to order. By the time I got finished arguing over purchasing limits and being told that the GPU that I wanted was overkill and the ONE that they had was more than what I needed, it left such a bad taste in my mouth that I decided to go somewhere where they thought the customer is right. They didn’t even bother to find out that I do video rendering and needed exactly what I was asking for.

I just went to New Egg’s website to link to the things that they limited my purchases on and this evening, not a single one of those things is limited. Go figure.

Ah, I at least found a mention of the overall policy, although this isn’t exactly what I was told over the phone: New Egg Customer limits

Keith, thanks for sharing your experience with this.

I just remembered, New Egg is not what I remembered from a few years ago, some Chinese company bought them out.

Bob

Bob, in my earlier post I talked about the problem I have with their third party suppliers. So far, parts directly from them have been fine for me. Hope that continues. Just read carefully who ships the part you want.

Even if they SHIP it it's not like they are building the motherboards. They will always come from SOME supplier. And most often they are shadow companies who all use Chinese suppliers.

People who order guitar parts see this almost 100% of the time. This pickguard situation i have been dealing with was a great example. I searched and searched and finally found the vendor to buy pickguards for my Telecaser and Jazzmaster. The differences were slight price variations and some offered free shipping. Both of them arrived in Allparts packaging. So why not just buy from Allparts? And even then, Allparts doesn't make the pickguards.

Anybody who has read The World Is Flat (THE best book I ever read!) understands the twisted tunnels of the economy and supply chain anymore. You buy from Bob who buys from Joe who buys from Fred who buys from Mike. You have no direct path to Mike though. And everything you buy is made in countries where people are grateful to have a job where they work for 4 bucks a day and a bag of rice.

I had one guy go on and on about how he only buys items made in the USA. My reply was "Really? So you were there to SEE it built in the USA? Is it not possible the people selling it to you were, um, what's that word, LYING to you to get your dollar? I believe that if you track the origin of anything you buy it will land in a foreign country. Nobody is going to pay an employee 20 bucks an hour when they can get the same thing done for 2 in Indonesia."

Economics has made cheap foreign labor popular and technology has made it possible. Customer support is absolutely dead anymore. You get people in India, Costa Rica and the Philippines who can barely speak English and can only read phonetically from a script that know nothing that is not in the script. The temperature of most of the working population is such that they can be as rude as the want to because they can always move on to the NEXT minimum wage job when they get fired from this one.

Newegg is actually owned by Liaison Interactive in China.

I have turned this over and over in my mind the last few days and the only thing that I have come up with is that this is New Egg’s attempt to defeat the “toilet paper mentality” that overcame the country at the beginning of the Covid-19 epidemic. There is currently a computer chip shortage that is affecting a number of industries and the auto and GPU manufacturers have been particularly hard hit. I did quite a bit of research on the problem when we purchased our new mini van back in April and the current problem is not just because the economy is having to gear back up from the pandemic but one of the largest chip manufacturing facilities in the world burned to the ground in Japan taking one of the major manufacturers out of the game for awhile. This factory was the sole source of Chips for FORD motors causing them to completely shut down new car manufacturing pending them being able to secure another source of chips.

Meanwhile on the the GPU and RAM front, manufacturing has slowed down leading to people buying up, hoarding, and reselling GPUs at jacked up prices, so I’m guessing part of New Egg’s strategy is to give as many people as possible the opportunity to purchase certain items without opening up an avenue of supply to people trying to profit off the shortage.

At least this shortage is real. When Windows 95 came out a LOT of people needed to add RAM for it to run correctly. I was in that majority. I also ended up paying $325 for and 8 MEG stick of RAM to bring my computer up to a whopping 16 MEG of RAM. The price was so high because (ahem) there had allegedly been a fire in a silicon production factory somewhere in China or Japan or whichever city they picked to support their lie. Due to that (alleged) fire the silicon needed to make RAM was (again, allegedly) scarce. I still believe, 26 years later, that there was no fire and that it was an opportunistic, collusive effort to drive prices up knowing that since there were so many people like me who needed more RAM to run Windows 95 that this was a prime money making scam. And yeah, I had no choice to be or not to be a victim.

$325 for 8 MEGS!!! Not GIGS. MEGS. Amazing what "they" pull.

Ha, you ain't seen nothing yet!
In 1988 I was working on an Amiga 2000 - the one in the big metal box.
The basic machine cost £2K and to up-grade to 8 meg we had to buy an expansion card which cost a further £850.
Actually, it was a great computer for the time.

That same $325 will buy 64 GIGS of RAM today. I get inflation and all, but man...