Once upon a time a girl set out to sell a golden bracelet that she inherited from her aunt who had been a good person to all of her family, and then said girl realized she owned a lot of money, way more than usual. It was not enough to be rich and live happily ever after, and it was too much to just invite her mum to a fancy restaurant and have a blast. It was too much for a new pair of jeans, and not enough for a bitcoin.
So, what should she do? She bought a new computer, of course, because her old one was barely more than a typewriter compared to modern standards.
The Price Part
She choose a more or less local company named MiFCOM( (https://www.mifcom.de/) that provides an online configurator, namelythis.
She set up a configuration (see details below) that would cost her €1399,90 delivery including, and then she had her friend look up all the parts prices to see how much could be saved when homebrewing the computer. He did a great job and his data revealed this:
case: Thermaltake Core V1 €39,99
motherboard: MSI B250I Pro Intel B250 So.1151 Dual Channel DDR4 Mini-ITX Retail €79,75
CPU: Intel Core i5-7500, 4x 3.4GHz, 6MB Cache | HD 630 €178,83
ram: HyperX DIMM 16 GB DDR4-2133 Kit €172,90
videocard: MSI GTX 1070 AERO ITX 8G OC €398,15
harddrive: Seagate BarraCuda 1TB (ST1000DM003) €47,50
power supply: Corsair TX-M Series TX650M €77,73
total: €994.85
He forgot to mention Windows 10 Home Edition, wich is about app. €40 here, so it is rather a total of €1034,85.
The Customer Service Part
We chose to order the machine instead of building it on our own because we are of the opinion that the price difference from €1034,85 to 1399,90 really is worth the work and support provided by MiFCOM. There is a standard 3 years warranty plus that we can send in the computer in case of any troubles rather than have to track down and troubleshoot the issue ourselves. Not being very deep into IT, this is the best option for us. There is a really good customer service hotline that already helped out a lot when we had trouble with plugging in our somewhat special monitor... well, that is another story and our own fault. For payment they offer a number of standard options, we chose Paypal because this is our usual way to pay for things when possible.
The computer was ordered on New Year's eve, produced only a day later on January 2nd, passed controls on January 3rd and was delivered on January 4th in the morning. The guy building the thing gave me a rang and asked for my OK to build in a better videocard for the same price, just because he knew it would work so much better in this specific computer case. This impressed me most. When the pc arrived it was easy to unpack, had a note with security advice attached in such manner one can use it -before- it is too late and it worked fine without any trouble. A+.
The Happy Ending
So, and what happened to that poor old and replaced computer? It is still honored. The girl uses it to write and study on without being distracted by games and Steemit. Though she loves being distracted that way!