Should you buy OEM PC?

I strongly advice you not to buy most OEM systems. Specially Dell and HP. I will explain why.

Custom components

Very often big stores like Dell or HP will build and put custom components in their PC. As result it is not possible to upgrade them. Imagine you bought Dell PC. After some time, you would like to upgrade your video card. But this video card requires more power, so you have to upgrade power supply. But they use custom power supply with different mounting, so it is simply not possible to unscrew old one and put new one. So, you will have to buy power supply from Dell and that will be much more expensive. And actually, in some cases you simply cannot buy power supplies with enough power because Dell will not make them. I had these problems quite few times.

Performance

These vendors will try to save cost everywhere. Their try to make cheaper and less performant motherboards, use slower memory. I had few cases when we bought Dell PCs and later, I build PC with exactly the same specs. Custom PC always faster by quite big margin. In some cases, it can be as extreme as 20%-40%. Also check this link https://www.mirabulus.com/it/blog/2019/05/08/intel-oem-system. When you check specs that PC looks great but in reality, it is quite slow.  

More expensive

Pretty much always OEM PC will be more expensive if you buy it by parts. Again, as with performance I assembly custom PC and almost always it is quite cheaper. You need to understand that you will pay for support that you probably don’t need, for custom development of this PC etc.

Less settings

While this is not really important but very often settings in BIOS will be very limited and basic. In some cases, it could be problem, but these situations are rare.

Can you build custom PC?

Somebody could say that assembling and buying custom PC is complex process. Well many web sites provide already prebuild PC’s So you can order set that has all components that are compatible. There are many forums that can help you find out compatible parts. And assembling parts are quite easy. You can find a lot of videos in youtube. It is easier than Lego. You just should not apply force where it is not necessary. I did it many times and never had problem.

Sometimes OEM OC is OK

But in some cases, if you don’t want to mess with this stuff and never plan to upgrade your system then perhaps building OEM system is not bad idea.