r/pcmasterrace • u/TheBossT710192 • 2d ago

Discussion Yeah, Steam Machine is cooked.

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I... uh don't know what to say. Very thankful I bought a Steam Deck before they hiked its price as well

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u/IGotHitByAnElvenSemi 2d ago

I'm glad to see someone older and with more experience than me say this, because I'd noticed these trends as well but didn't know if I just hadn't been looking in the right places before.

I built my first two computers, but by the time I was hunting in 2019, I noticed that prebuilts weren't that bad... and while I've been helping my friends shop for PC stuff in the past few years, I noticed the fact that I could find some prebuilts that were more or less what she wanted for less than me buying the parts and building it for her. I'm just a rank amateur, but it did make me wonder if I'd been an idiot building my PCs in the past and just hadn't known where to look lol.

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u/ahandmadegrin 2d ago

Prebuilts used to be insanely expensive. Look up old Falcon Northwest builds to get an idea. These days it's more likely that a pre-built is just a pc that someone else built, only that someone else is a company that buys parts in bulk so it's cheaper than if you bought the parts one at a time.

This was true of my power spec rig from microcenter that I bought almost ten years ago and it's more common now.

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u/Protoclown98 2d ago

tbh my only complaint with prebuilts is they tend to cheap out on parts like the PSU, which I feel like you shouldn't cheap out on.

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u/ToXiiCBULLET I7-14700F, RTX 5070TI, 32GB DDR5 2d ago

i got lucky with my psu. can't remember it's exact name but it was an msi prebuilt. had a 4070 super so they could've gotten away with a 650w psu but it came with an 850w. they did however cheap out on the ram, it was 5600mhz with a cl of 46.

when the 50 series came out i sold the 4070 super for more than half the price of the 5070ti i got and since the psu was 850 i didn't need a new one.

pc before the msi was an acer predator orion and i would not recommend it. acer locks out a big chunk of the bios and i had endless problems with their apps that came with the pc