Assembling a computer these days is almost foolproof, as long as you take some basic precautions with the electronics and don't force anything that doesn't seem to fit [smile]

You really can't beat the price of building for yourself. It's been years since I've found a desktop price that was remotely competitive with the cost of buying top-end parts and assembling them at home. For low-end machines and laptops it's a different story, but for anything beefy, roll your own.

As a bonus, after a couple years of building and upgrading your own machines, you usually end up with a ton of spare parts and can build a couple of "free" extra boxes. Great for testing machines, build servers, backup boxes, using for random purposes, target practice...

There are lots of boutique gamer-PC vendors out there, Cyberpower, Falcon NW, AlienWare to name a few. What you get out of the deal is people who know what they're doing with pairing the parts, by-hand assembly by someone who probably cares more than the person who assembles stock Dells in china, impeccable cabling (typically), optimized configuration and burn-in-testing.

For the most part, PC parts just work together if you choose parts that are specced correctly, however the fine details of various pairings of parts can produce small performance gains against the naive choice. Also, certain platforms might be picky about, say, which RAM modules are acceptable (Apple machines are nutoriously picky about the precision of RAM timing and voltage levels, for example) and its nice to have this sorted out ahead of time, rather than having to RMA one set of RAM modules for another.

You do pay a premium, and what it gets you amount to basically:

1) Typically very high build-quality (sound isolation, neatly-routed cabling).
2) Not having to do the research (parts compatability) and build yourself.
3) Not having to deal with returning/replacing mis-paired or faulty parts.
4) Expertise in component selection and pairing.

CyberPower is among the cheaper boutique Gamer-PC vendors, and if avoiding the headaches of a home-build is worth it to you, then their prices are fair. You can, however, if so inclined, purchase and build your own machine with relatively little trouble if you're willing to put the time into researching parts and building out the machine. Even an experienced home-builder will likely spend at least a free day (if not two) building out the machine, putting components through a stress-test (to ensure the stability of the machine) and installing operational software -- which is not to mention the time spent researching components. Its also a bit of a headache when something goes wrong -- during my last home-build I went through a PSU and a hard-drive before finally discovering my RAM modules were faulty.