Buying a Pre-Built computer or Building one

Quick question if you have a moment. New Egg has some pre-built computers on sale for Black Friday. I'm looking at this one.

It looks good to me, not amazing. I'm not looking to play the biggest games at max settings. Mostly indie games and some MMOs. My max price range is $1500 but I'd liked to be around $1250. I have a friend who will help me build a computer. Do you think I would get a better computer building one around that price?? Has anyone bought from IbuyPower before?? Thanks for your time.

Decent specs, although the specifications are very vague on a few of the components. I'm assuming, if anything, that they are cheapening out on the motherboard, HDD/SSD, and PSU in order to make a profit. You can definitely save some money by building one yourself, and you can even save more money by lowering some of the specs if all you plan on playing is MMOs and indie games. An R9 280x (~$130 cheaper than the GTX 970) and a older generation i5 CPU (~$120 cheaper than an i7 CPU) can easily max out those particular types of games.

I've never bought from iBUYPOWER, but I've read horror stories on PC forums. Given that you are planning to buy from Newegg and not directly from iBUYPOWER, any issues you have with warranty could be compounded due to buying from a third party.

Personally I think you should build your own, especially since you have a friend that will help you. You can then learn to build a PC on your own and never have to worry about issues that arise from buying pre-built PCs.

Why doesn't it say which motherboard it has? "Custom Liquid Cooling"...what is that, precisely? Which brand of GPU does it have? RAM latency? Type of PSU? Is it modular? Efficiency rating? Which type of hard drives are those and how fast are they?

All of that vagueness probably means they are using the cheapest possible solutions, making that thing overpriced as hell. No thanks.

Building yourself is always a lot cheaper, and really not that difficult (though I can understand that it seems pretty daunting). Just make sure to have a tech savvy friend or a forum thread check your list of components before you buy it to make sure you didn't get something incompatible (and don't worry about the people who nitpick the minor stuff).

If you still really don't want to, a lot of hardware shops have the option to put it together for you. In my personal opinion I'd still take that over the fancy looking prebuild packages. It just reeks of them selling the sizzle of the sausage.

I've heard horrible things about the quality of PC's that iBUYPOWER sell, I'd steer clear. You could build yourself a PC that you will be way more satisfied with, for cheaper.

This is a great build right here, to give you an idea of what to get. Just don't buy the video card it suggests. Definitely don't go with AMD, stick with the 970.

@rentfn: I highly recommend this build. I will admit I'm kinda biased because that's straight up what I have but I fucking love it.

Thanks everyone for your help. Looks like I will be tricking a friend to help me. Might go with @corevi's computer.

@rentfn: Glad to help!

As near as I can tell, I recreated the iBUYPOWER with these are the parts from these manufactures. The only thing that does not look totally the same is the keyboard, mouse, but it looks like iBuypower contracted Rosewill for those parts. The power supply is without a doubt a Rosewill too, despite being rated for 600 on the machine and 630 as a Rosewill. The only thing I could not be sure of is the RAM, but if you look at the pictures of that RAM has no heatshields. So, it is cheap RAM, but you can't even get RAM that cheap on the open market anymore, so I just put the least expensive 16 GB I could find.

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/qHck8d

Intel Core i7-4790K 4.0GHz Quad-Core

Enermax ELC-LM120S-TAA 105.7 CFM Liquid

ASRock H97 Anniversary ATX LGA1150

Team Elite Plus 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3-1600

Corsair Force LS 120GB 2.5" SSD

Hitachi Ultrastar 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM

MSI GeForce GTX 970 4GB Twin Frozr V

NZXT Phantom 240 ATX Mid Tower

Rosewill 630W ATX12V / EPS12V

LG GH24NSC0B DVD/CD Writer

Microsoft Windows 8.1 - 64-bit (OEM) (64-bit)

Edimax EW-7811UTC 802.11a/b/g/n/ac USB 2.0

Rosewill RK-8100 (Keyboard)

Rosewill RGM-300 Wired Optical

Total cost $1,269.94

My guess is you could upgrade everything except the CPU, GPU and spend maybe $120 more to get better MOBO, RAM, COOLER, STORAGE, PSU, CASE, and WIRELESS and end up with a better system.