GoKawiilAnyone dedicated to saving a buck could spend a little time researching, shopping and toiling to build their own PC. This has been true since the earliest days of personal computing. Usually, it would result in a considerable discount compared to an off-the-shelf, prebuilt PC.
That has changed. The AI-driven confluence of RAMageddon, the NAND-pocalypse and the heavy demand for powerful GPUs has made the current PC component market a nightmare to navigate. Things that were sometimes affordable, like RAM and storage, have skyrocketed in price. Graphics cards rarely drop below retail price, but now high-tier models can be several times more expensive than their launch MSRP… and that's if you can find them at all.
With the market gone haywire, PC building isn't what it once was. Original equipment manufacturers and boutique PC builders have advantages that DIYers don't when it comes to sourcing components, and that means plenty of prebuilt systems actually have the advantage in price. I scoured the market for competitively priced prebuilt systems and then worked out the cost of a similar DIY configuration using PCPartPicker. The truth is that it's ultimately not cheaper to build your own PC anymore. I explain how I got my price estimates at the end.
Every end of the market is affected
I wish I could say it was only the extreme high-end of the DIY market that has become overpriced, but it isn't. The DIY prices I've found have proved more expensive than the most competitive prebuilts across budget, midrange and high-end configurations.
Most of the budget models I found were more expensive than DIY, but there were still some that were cheaper. There was more variability in the midrange and high-end market, but invariably, there were several prebuilt options that existed to undercut a DIY version.
One of the more affordable prebuilts I spotted was this HP Omen 16L from Sam's Club at just $1,199. To DIY a PC with the same CPU, GPU and comparable memory and storage, I was looking at $1,544. A Lenovo LOQ Tower 26ADR10 available at Micro Center costs just $999. The DIY budget to replicate that hit $1,071 before even including a CPU and motherboard, which can't even be copied because Lenovo used a special motherboard with a laptop CPU.
Asus/CNET
In the midrange, Sam's Club offers an Asus ROG G700 with an Intel Core Ultra 7 265F, 32 gigabytes of DDR5 RAM, Nvidia RTX 5070 with 12GB VRAM and 2 terabytes of PCIe 4.0 storage for $1,749. I was looking at $2,033 to make a comparable DIY. For what it's worth, I really tried to cheap out with my DIY attempts, opting for a $74 case, $89 power supply (don't skimp on power supplies, people!) and a cheapo $54 cooler. Even if you got all three of those components for free, the DIY build would still cost $1,816.
I saw the biggest swings in the high-end simply because the margins add up that much more. One pre-builtOne prebuilt was $649 more expensive than DIY, while another prebuilt was $632 cheaper than DIY. Ultimately, it doesn't matter that some prebuilts are more expensive than DIY. There will always be overpriced options. Average price differences can paint a more balanced picture between DIY and prebuilts, but it only takes one overpriced bad apple to skew the data. Only a few prebuilts need to outprice DIY for it to be effectively undercut, and that's just what I saw.
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