PCUSA.com

[Omnipotent]

Thoughts on the site? Reliable? I'm one of those when I want to buy something 500$+ electronic wise, I can never decide, because I want the best deal. I can build a i7 core, same MB as my Christmas PC post, with 6G ram 500 HDD and the same card for about 800.

[Cephius]

There don't seem to be many reviews around... but they seem kinda shady.

[Olo401]

Just for the heck of it I took a look at their pre-built systems. Let's take their i5-750 system with a starting price of $575 as our example.. naturally they arrive at that price by cutting corners:

- a low-feature mATX board
- a very low-end video card
- no operating system or software
- small HDD by today's standards
- stock cooling
- no monitor, kb/mouse or speakers included
- all of the above allows them to get away with a low wattage power supply

As expected most of their upgrades to better parts are overpriced, but the lack of selection was a problem especially on the power supply, hard drive and cooler upgrade choices. After changing things around to get as close to what I'd just build myself, the price jumped up over $1100 which still didn't include a monitor, peripherals or the OS.

But hey.. they build it for you, warranty their work and ship it in 3 days or less. Doesn't seem any better or worse than any other build shop out there, but they don't seem to really focus on what gamers actually need. Even the systems on their "gaming" page don't jump out at you as anything more than a throw-together... same boring LQ Raidmax case, barely an upgrade on the video card from their base systems, etc..

[Omnipotent]

* CPU: Intel® Core™ i7-860 2.80 GHz 8M L2 Cache LGA1156
* HDD: Single Hard Drive (750GB SATA-II 3.0Gb/s 16MB Cache 7200RPM HDD [-21])
* MEMORY: 4GB (2GBx2) PC1333 DDR3 PC3 10666 Dual Channel Memory (Corsair Dominator [+39])
* MOTHERBOARD: [CrossFireX] Asus P7P55D LE Intel P55 Chipset DDR3 LGA1156 ATX Mainboard w/ 7.1 HD Audio, GbLAN, USB2.0, SATA-II RAID, 2 Gen2 PCIe X16, 2 PCIe X1 & 3 PCI
* SOUND: HIGH DEFINITION ON-BOARD 7.1 AUDIO
* VIDEO: ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB DDR5 16X PCIe Video Card [DirectX 11 Support] (Major Brand Powered by ATI)

That setup was about 1400 on their site. I did it on another site for 1100. That's with shipping, case, wireless card, optical drives. Extra fans, extended warranty, Extra cool lighting, overclocking 20%. PCUSA doesn't offer any of that.