An “Outlet” for Geeks

Back in the day (when I was a slave…) no real gamer would ever brag about buying a pre-built PC. Especially from a company like Gateway, HP or Dell. Unless the machine you purchased came from companies like Falcon Northwest or Alienware, you would be the laughing stock of the (LAN) party.

Now though, because of the current rise in popularity of gaming, and to some extent, globalization, companies like Gateway, HP and Dell are focusing on building bleeding-edge machines at a reduced cost. Each company has its own “Elite” offering; Gateway has its FX lineup, HP has its excellent BlackBird PC’s, and Dell…well, they went one step further and actually purchased Alienware, who builds their XPS machines.

If you haven’t checked recently, all of these machines are extremely expensive. You pay a premium for the custom cases, the custom software (or in Dell’s case for them not to install the software) and for the special hardware (X-fi Sound Cards, SLI Video Cards). Everything that you can order in one of these premium machines, seemingly, comes with a premium price.

So where’s the value for the budget minded? Well, If your an enthusiast you can most likely build your own machine. You can search sites like zipzoomfly, and newegg, and purchase your PC piece by piece. You can scour the net for drivers, and research information on what hardware is compatible. After some effort and choice words, you can hope and pray (oh flying spaghetti monster…) that your newly built bad-ass machine actually boots; and then spend hours of your life trying to fix it if it doesn’t.

Or, with a little luck, you can give The Dell Outlet a try. If your willing to suffer through some horrible page design and search features, you can come out with some truly amazing deals.

Most of Dell’s Outlet’ machines are considered “Certified Refurbished”. Upon asking a sales representative what that meant I was told that the definition varies. A Certified Refurbished machine simply means that under most conditions, if a machine that was purchased and delivered is returned, Dell has its “Technicians” do a thorough check to make sure that everything is in working order. If it is, it gets “Certified” and put on the website.

This could be anything from a Buyers Remorse machine (someone bought it, couldn’t swallow the fact that they spent $3,400 on a PC, and returned it.) to a computer that ended up at a customer’s house, and didn’t boot up properly (power supply failure, bad motherboard.) They also have an assortment of Scratch and Dent machines, which are just as the name implies.

Now you really have to look to find the deals, but how about this machine:

Dell Inspiron 530 with 4 GB of RAM, a 500 GB SATA II Samsung HD, and an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 with Windows Vista Home Premium. A Gigabit NIC, an Internal Bluetooth Card, as well as a 6-1 Media Reader and an ATI Radeon 2400 HD Pro. (Comes complete with new packaging, keyboard, mouse, mouse-pad and cabling.)

The price? $529.00, shipped!

Building this system through Dell new would have cost over $900.00 + Shipping. The closest I could find by building the machine was $742.00 + shipping, and that was with low end parts.

The CPU alone, at the time of writing this, cost $239.00 and up.

After swapping these components into a custom case, and buying a high end GPU, you could easily have a machine that will destroy anything you throw at it, for less than $750.00.

If your looking at purchasing a new machine anytime soon, I would seriously suggest checking out Dell’s Outlet. The only caveat; inventory is extremely limited (that PC was the only Quad Core machine available at the time) and you can only keep an item in your shopping cart for 15 minutes.

If your savvy enough though, this might be a excellent “Outlet” for all of your geeky needs.