Reviews PC Specialist Enigma S1 Review

Can anyone advise what CoolerMaster CPU setup they are using? I priced this build up to compare value, by using Scan, which is expensive in the UK.

Scan.co.uk
£250 - i5 9600K
£68 - 250GB Samsung 970 EVO
£260 - Zotac GTX 1660Ti stock model
£96 - ASUS TUF Z370-PLUS GAMING II
£90 - 16GB (2x8GB) Corsair DDR4 Vengeance LPX Black, PC4-24000 (3000)
£78 - Corsair TX550M
£54 - 2TB Seagate Barracuda
£80 - Fractal Case
£60 - CoolerMaster Master Liquid 240mm AIO (assumed cooler)

£1036.

Shopping around I can often save £150-£200 off of Scan's price. So let's say I can self build this exact rig for £850-£950.

How does the company justify the price for what is ultimately a poor performing i5-9600K and 1660ti combination? It's not good value, and it doesn't perform as well as it should, meaning they haven't throughly cross tested all the hardware before designing this build.

Yes, I get that there is a premium for someone else building your PC, but should the premium be around a quarter of the full price for a system? I guess they also can get the components a lot cheaper than I can.

This rig is too expensive and under-performs on the sum of it's components. Why did they bother?

 

Prove it.
No short term special offers, no ebay / amazon marketplace / other grey market stuff, shops must show parts as in stock and don't forget the Windows license.

 

I won't bother going through the whole list. Let's just start with the CPU. If I go to overclockers.co.uk, I can buy the i5-9600K OEM (as buying watercooling), without offers, for £218.99 inc VAT. So I am already £31 cheaper than scan. Would you like me to continue?

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/inte...e-socket-lga1151-processor-oem-cp-65p-in.html

Also at OCUK, I can save £3 on the samsung EVO drive, getting it for £65 - https://www.overclockers.co.uk/sams...-3.0-x4-nvme-solid-state-drive-hd-23m-sa.html

Thats £34 cheaper on just two products.

If I buy the RAM from Aria.co.uk, it is on special offer at 77.39, but as you said no special offers, the aria FULL price for the RAM is £84 another £6 saving. £40 saved and still all those high priced items like motherboard, gfx card, water cooling and case to go.

https://www.aria.co.uk/SuperSpecials/Other+products/16GB+(2x8GB)+Corsair+Vengeance+LPX+3000MHz+DDR4+Memory+?productId=69525

I use Scan often, but it is the most expensive of the UK specialist online retailers. I am not going to go through the other high value items, I will leave you to do some looking to see for yourself how easy it is to save £150 compared to using scan for a whole build valued at around a £1000 on scan. Also, that scan price includes a £5 discount on the motherboard, and no OS. I only need OEM licenses, and I have plenty of those, so windows doesn't cost me a penny.

That was visiting just two UK sites, if I expanded my reach further, I could probably get some things slightly cheaper than that elsewhere.

 

Irrelevant since you complained about the price of the PC Specialist PC which includes a legit Windows 10 key, so unless you include that the comparison is false.

As for the rest of the components:

GPU = 259.71 at Kikatek, oh no, a whopping £0.28 saving.
Mobo = Scan is the cheapest, by a mile.
PSU = 60.44 at CCL, saved £18.
HDD = 53.50 at CCL, saved £0.37.
Cooler = No need to assume which one it is, it is £49.99 at Scan, cheapest one is (and you won't believe this, Currys / PcWorld) for 44.99, so another £5 saved.
Case = Scan is the cheapest by a little.

So lets add that to those £40 and you get a total saving of drumroll please: £63.65, so it doesn't even reach 10% on that £1K.

Don't get me wrong, I won't make any excuses for Scan doing stuff like charging 30% extra on that particular PSU... but you simply can't extrapolate that across an entire system, so lets just put the silly notion of saving 15 - 25% on a £1K build compared to Scan prices to rest.

 

Fair enough, this is a new CPU and GPU combination, so saving that money may not be possible but it is not impossible to do that on a scan build, i've done it more than a few times over the years.

Also, my OEM keys are 100% genuine. I can supply them with any PC I build and sell completely legally. Please do not imply I do anything illegal, or illegitimate. You buy a PC off me, the Key is a 100% legal OEM key. I buy in bulk in advance, so I have a lot still here.

 

That certainly wasn't the intention, just trying to keep it apple to apple.

 

I never said I would sell it for £850, I said it could be built for around £850, and I questioned whether the premuim being charged for building by someone else was worth it. If this company doesn't get better deals on pricing than me, I'd be shocked as well.

To quote my own post:

 

I charge parts + 5% build fee.

This isn't my full time business anymore, so I no longer offer anything other than the standard parts warranties from manufacturers, but even when I did, build fee was only 10%. Delivery is charged at whatever delivery costs.

I assume you will not have any issues with me including special offer prices in the parts pricing? Especially as it would reduce your build fee.

 

Sounds like you are a business rather than a private user looking to build a new PC for themselves. As a business, you may well want to pay a 30% premium to meet your demands, you will have obligations that your company must meet and conditions like the warranty and speed of repair are much more important, you can't have your employees sat there doing nothing all day can you, the cost to your business would be terrible. You also realise this is a gaming machine right? Are you actually sure your business needs this exact model, I am pretty sure there are much better machines suited to your specific business needs than this device.

You see, I can go completely off the tanget of the point as well, it doesn't improve the discussion, it is useless wandering, so how about we all get back to the point I was making and stop with all these stupid diversions.

I don't want to quote myself again, but it seems everyone keeps ignoring the point of my argument.

The value proposition of this device for gamers is what I was discussing. This being a gaming machine and all that. Should the premium be a quarter of the full price of a system?

I am asking directly, as an end user, why you would pay out for this system, over building it yourself for a MASSIVE saving. Warranties don't influence normal gamer purchasing decisions to that level. Yes you can say the increased cost is because of the warranty, but where is any value in that to the gamer who purchases the system? Most people do not value the warranty of the system over and above the quality of the system itself.

Oh, and can you 100% guarantee that the price of this system and every part used in it will be absolutely identical in 6 months time? I don't see anywhere the company promising they will never substitue a like for like component in the lifetime of the build?

Not a problem. I'll even do a full colour invoice with each line marked in a different color, specifying the individual VAT per line if you'd like at No Extra Charge. You are the 2nd person to imply illegal practices in this thread. I have not cast any aspersions on anyone else and their comments, so please stop implying I am doing anything illegal. I may not have a warehouse and 50 underpaid employees, but I still operate legitimately.

I thought you were above logical fallacies and ad-hominem attacks, guess not.

 

@Gareth Halfacree - I see what has happened here. Everyone has got hooked up on me being able to purchase a system cheaper than the scan price I put together.

All the while conveniently ignoring the fact the scan price was already £150 cheaper than the purchase price of this system. Yes, I can build a machine cheaper than buying all the parts from scan, if you can't you shouldn't be buying PC parts, but ignoring my cheaper PC, take the component price at scan.

Why would you spend £1200 on this gaming PC, as a gamer, rather than £1038 on the parts individually on scan? Is the premium worth it?