Palicomp, PC Specialist or Arbico? Help!

Stephani

It's my son's birthday in July and he wants a new computer to play his games on and for his school work (OK - I want it for school he just wants to play games on it! :rotfl:). We've narrowed it down to a choice of 3 and I wondered if anyone could recommend which one would be good to go with (or avoid!).

The shortlist at the moment is the Phoenix i5 Trooper by Palicomp, the Vortex 750 by PC Specialist and the Quiet 2477 by Arbico. They are all roughly in the same price range (around 100 pounds between them) and seem to quite similar in what they offer, but I'm wary about spending this much money and not getting what we pay for . I've done some Google searches on each company and all of them seem to have people saying they are good and bad so it doesn't really help decide.

Are there any techies out out there who have used any of these companies and can give me a yes or no on which one to use? Or if there are any other companies you would recommend? Someone told us that it would be best to build the PC ourselves but we wouldn't have the first clue where to start, so that's definitely a no-go.

The more I look at it the more it boggles my mind, so if anyone could give me some tips about what I should be looking for or questions I need to ask them then I would be eternally grateful. :A

Thanks,

Steph

spannerzone

Hmm all I know is that Palicomp used to have a terrible reputation and their feedback on Ebay used to be utterly attrocious (premium rate tech support lines, sending out PC's without the front audio ports working and stating that it was normal as no one generally used them, yes seriously), not to mention the somewhat questionable advertising such as 12GHz processors that were 3GHz quad core processors.... plus their Ebay adds showed lots of components suggesting plug in graphics cards (when they were onboard) and so on..... they do seem to have cleaned up their act in recent times but I still wouldn't touch them and would either get a Dell / HP or maybe build my own.

Oh and they seem to use the most awful PC cases I've ever seen, sure I'm an old fart but do people really want techno coloured LED fan lighted mega towers of awesome manliness?

http://www.reviewcentre.com/reviews243987.html

indie63

I wouldnt touch H/P or Dell to be honest, PC Specialist would be my choice, i have had 2 computers off them, they use good components and very reliable and should do your son for a good few years.

Toxteth_OGrady

Trustpilot is a good site for checking out companies.

http://www.trustpilot.co.uk/

Aria and Novatech are good for custom builds.

RussJK

Toxteth_OGrady wrote: »

Trustpilot is a good site for checking out companies.

http://www.trustpilot.co.uk/

Aria and Novatech are good for custom builds.

Didn't Cube247 have a lot of raving reviews on this site, most of which were written on the same afternoon?

Edit: http://www.trustpilot.co.uk/review/www.cube247.co.uk

Any time there was a negative review, they'd go and write loads of positive reviews the next day. They went particularly nuts over November 2010.

Can't trust Trustpilot, as the retailers can fake the reviews at will.

laptop80

My brother has a computer from Palicomp which he is really happy with and said he would recommend them. Having seen the PC in question it is very tidily put together, with all the cables nicely tied back and generally having the bits well laid out. I don't know with regards to service or aftercare, but as far as I know he has never had any problems with them, which is a rarity for him.

As far as the price goes, you will get a better deal from Palicomp or any of the others than you would from many of the big manufacturers such as Dell (or Alienware as they brand their higher-end gaming PCs). The reliability of many of the big, well-known companies isn't as good as you might think, and they are massively overpriced, meaning you will often pay more for a worse, lower specification system.

Re: the cases, outrageously styled boxes of flashing lights, covered with flames, skulls or other paraphanelia which would make them look perfectly at home in a 2 Fast 2 Furious film are pretty much par for the course. For some reason high-performance automatically equates with "mine is bigger than yours" macho attitude in the eyes of PC assembers, but given the fact they are mostly aimed at young men I suspect it's a look that works and one that your son will love.

As has been mentioned, reviews aren't always quite what they seem, but take the usual precautions - e.g. using a credit card when you order so that you have the protection should things go wrong - and you should be ok. Also worth phoning them up and speaking to them before placing an order to get a feel for things, or even better, get someone who knows about computers to phone up for you so they can ask the right questions and see if they get satisfactory answers. As you are looking at overclocked machines you want an assembler which is technically competent and has taken everything into consideration, not one that just throws all the components in and hopes for the best (they need to have an understanding of how everything works to avoid building bottlenecks into the system which will adversely affect performance).

Best of luck!

rayman112

Personally if you want the best deal in terms of both hardware and software I recommend building one yourself. Not as hard as you think if you follow some Youtube tutorials

However if you must but a rebuild pc I recommend Arbico or Mo Customs.

Have dealt with both companies and did not have a problem, though the latter is not as well known. Only problem I had with Arbico was one occurrence where the CPU Fan Header wasn’t connected.:D Simple to fix however so its all good.

santer_2

Have got a PC Specialist build and it worked fine for years, when it went wrong it needed a lot doing to get it going again. Would use them again, however, they did / do take a while to custom build.

spannerzone

As always, it's the luck of the draw... I've built many PC's and nowadays can't be arsed as branded PC's often cost no more if you take into account the cost of buying Windows (if that's what you want)

Dell and HP - well I've had lots of Dells and use HP's at work and no problems at all..... of course we all have read about horror stories with these companies but that's life!

free4440273

HP machines -- esp. the 'business' models -- I very much like -- I have three HP desktop towers and very happy with all : i3/i5/ and just recently a lovely i7 Sandy Bridge model . :cool:

spannerzone

Yeah, the HP business desktops seem very solid and actually ideal for home users who want something decently made.