Buying a prebuilt gaming PC is like eating Fugu – it’s all about trust

Pre-built gaming PCs aren’t just the domain of noobie gamers. No, many an experienced gamer has been enticed by the glittering imagery and exciting performance promises of a shiny new manufacturer-made rig. But beneath the flashy neon pics and the impressive list of hardware specs are often gremlins lurking, ready to bite.

If you haven’t already guessed from that opener, I’m not in the “buy a pre-built gaming PC camp.” That’s not just because I’m a tech editor who likes to painstakingly oversee and choose every component in a new build until I reach performance perfection.

I also don’t have any illusions about wanting to be the go-to tech support guy among my family and friends — I am that guy anyways. No, it’s just that pre-built gaming PCs are incredibly risky business.

In fact, I’d go so far as to liken buying one to dinning on a meal of Fugu, a Japanese delicacy made from the porcupinefish (puffer fish). If you’re unfamiliar with Fugu, parts of it are so full of poison it needs meticulous preparation by a chef, and not just any chef, one with the know-how and steady hands of a brain surgeon.

Dinning on Fugu, then, is like taking the ultimate leap of faith. Sure, you could get a delicious, safe meal of tasty puffer and not keel over. Or a single bite may see you drop your chopsticks and leave your mortal coil for good. The big question then is: Do you trust the chef?

In the same way, you may have no problems with your pre-built gaming rig, or a ton of problems once you get it through the front door.

The poison to look out for here is bloatware, malfunctioning hardware, overheating, the incorporation of low-grade hardware and poorly configured hardware (mostly from a lack of care) — all scourges of a mass-produced item rather than a bespoke one that’s been carefully planned and put together for you and your needs.

But that’s not all, because there’s also the fact that you could be paying an over-inflated price for a rig whose performance is lackluster, or just downright terrible at worst, no matter the specs.

Hardware problems, in the worst case, could stop you in your tracks before you’ve even peeled the brand stickers off your machine’s shiny exterior, let alone launched a game. But with most pre-builds having manufacturers’ warranties, they’re arguably not as bad as the more insidious performance problems you could encounter.

RAM is often a cause of those performance problems. If the rig isn’t shipping with ultra-slow RAM, it may be fast RAM with poor latency (CL22 on 2933MHz RAM was an often-reported problem in pre-builds in years past). Manufacturers have also been known to pass off a single stick of RAM as dual channel, simply because the PC has a slot to run RAM as dual channel.

Then there’s performance issues linked to the build itself. Take Alienware’s 2022 R13 pre-built gaming PC as an example. One configuration of this rig shipped with an Intel Core i9-12900KF CPU and RTX 3090 GPU — that sounds glorious, doesn’t it?

But thermal performance benchmarks by Gamers Nexus showed its $570 CPU performed only as well as a step-down $340 Intel Core i7-12700K when compiling the same code, which amounted to a 16 percent downgrade in performance. The culprit? Gamers Nexus concluded that Dell’s sub-optimal build affected the CPU’s thermal and power limits.

Before you say, “but I could fix that in a jiffy,” in this case that would be easier said than done because of another scourge of pre-built gaming rigs: the proprietary hardware they often have.

That refers to hardware that’s been made especially for your pre-built PC — tech that’s basically useless anywhere except inside the rig itself, that you can’t just swap out for parts of your choosing.

In the case of the 2022 Alienware R13, there was a whole heap of it — from the cooler that came attached to the proprietary case, to the proprietary motherboard with a front-facing I/O that you would need to change out completely if it stopped working. The worst part of all is that the R13 shipped for a whopping $5,000 — which I have only one word for: ouch!

I’m not down on Dell’s Alienware products. In fact, they’re usually kick-ass gaming PCs that any gamer is lucky to have. Indeed, this problem can (and does) happen to other manufacturers too; the internet is peppered with examples — which is entirely my point.

Of course, pre-built rigs aren’t always bad; you could get lucky and land something like the HP Omen 45L that has three 120mm RGB intake fans and a 360mm liquid cooler. HP also promises tool-less upgradability, which bodes well for futureproofing the rig’s performance. You can also trust reviews of specific prebuilts by testers you trust, be it us here at PCWorld, GamersNexus, or whoever else.

Counterpoint: I bought a pre-built desktop gaming PC and I’m not sorry about it

Buying a pre-built has also helped some gamers through tough times. Indeed, at the height of the GPU shortage crisis back in 2022-2023, it was one of the only ways you could get a GPU at a reasonable price. But right now, that’s not as much of an issue.

So, take my advice and build your own gaming rig, one that you know is going to be the right price, have minimal issues, and perform well. You don’t even need to build it yourself; you just need someone who knows their stuff to help. In other words, a “chef” that you can trust.