I quit building rigs a long time ago. Pre-built is cheaper, has a better warranty plan, and doesn't cost you in unpaid time. Hobby enjoyment is the only compelling reason to buld now.
Sure, cheapo Dell's are crap, but they're fully warrantied crap and comparable in quality to most of the economical PC builder parts on the market. I've had decent name brand parts fail just as often. I get a feeling most of the discrete components for low to mid range parts are all manufactured at the same factories. The only significant quality increase you see is when you go for the premium parts, and they cost a pretty penny. In my experience, the worst parts for failure are main boards (followed closely by mechanical HDD's), and the most common component failures on the mainboards are the electrolytic caps in the voltage regulator circuits for the various MB component power supplies. If you identify the bad one's in time, and are handy with a soldering iron, you can even replace them yourself! Electrolytic caps are one of the more expensive discrete components, so it's easy to see why they are used in as minimal a fashion as possible to save money. Since they are made by the cheapest bidder, and engineered to constantly run at their maximum specs, they fail. Why? The marketing point of MB's is the chipset. Who buys mainboards because of quality capacitors?
"some people are like slinkies, they're not really good for anything but they can bring a smile to your face when you push them down a flight of stairs." –Unknown
"He did for bullshit what Stonehenge did for rocks." -Cecil Adams
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