Chillblast PC Build

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I'm thinking of dropping some cash on a kickass gaming rig. I have some experience of PC building from cheap/used parts but for this kind of investment I want a warranty behind it and the reassurance of having it built by people who know what they're doing (the PC I built lasted about six months before it crapped out with POST issues).

The budget I have is around £1,000. I'm led to understand that around £400 should be deducted from that to factor in the labour costs of the custom build and this is what I've come up with from the parts available from their site. I'm going for an ATX build with the following components:

Asus TUF Gaming Z490-Plus motherboard:

Intel Core i5-10600k CPU:

Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 4GB graphics card:

16GB DDR4 memory
Chillblast Centurion Direct Contact CPU cooler
1TB Seagate Barracuda PCIe SSD
2TB Seagate Barracuda mechanical hard drive
24x DVD R/W optical drive

Fractal Design 80 Plus 500w PSU:

Fractal Design Focus G case:

I would prefer a Corsair power supply to a Fractal Design one but they don't have a Corsair for 500w and I worry that 750w would be overkill for the build since the site didn't recommend a bigger PSU for the CPU and graphics card I chose (just a better CPU cooler). Plus, the benefit of having a warranty is that it's on them if their cheap PSU destroys the system. Would a 750w PSU be suitable for this build?

What do you guys think? Is this a good value build for the money? I haven't bought anything yet so please be honest about any areas where you think it could be improved. I mostly tend to play older and indie games and the only AAAs I'm worried about are Red Dead Redemption 2 and any future GTAs (not worried about GTA V because I've already played that to death on the XBox 360).
 
The budget I have is around £1,000. I'm led to understand that around £400 should be deducted from that to factor in the labour costs of the custom build

Is that the price difference between the parts and the cost? 400 seems very high that’s quite a profit margin. Did you include Windows and everything else?
 
Windows 10 Home Edition is included as part of basic price as is a 500GB PCIe SSD to put it on (I upgraded to 1TB for a bit of extra money). I also went for a motherboard with Wi-Fi built in to save the hassle of sourcing and fitting a Wi-Fi dongle.

I haven't checked the individual costs of the parts but the YT videos I watched seemed to indicate that £400 was the going rate (these guys have to earn a living just like everybody else!).

Edit: Just did the math and the CPU, motherboard and graphics card come to about £630 on their own. The Windows 10 costs £100 and if we throw in the DDR4 16GB memory, 1TB PCIe SSD, 2TB hard drive, the power supply and the DVD/RW optical drive I don't think Chillblast's profit margin can be much more than £100 just from the cost of the parts and if we throw in all the other business overheads they're not seeing much of this £1,000 at all. I would assume they're getting some kind of wholesale discount somewhere along the line otherwise this just wouldn't be viable.
 
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Windows 10 Home Edition is included as part of basic price as is a 500GB PCIe SSD to put it on (I upgraded to 1TB for a bit of extra money). I also went for a motherboard with Wi-Fi built in to save the hassle of sourcing and fitting a Wi-Fi dongle.

I haven't checked the individual costs of the parts but the YT videos I watched seemed to indicate that £400 was the going rate (these guys have to earn a living just like everybody else!).

Edit: Just did the math and the CPU, motherboard and graphics card come to about £630 on their own. The Windows 10 costs £100 and if we throw in the DDR4 16GB memory, 1TB PCIe SSD, 2TB hard drive, the power supply and the DVD/RW optical drive I don't think Chillblast's profit margin can be much more than £100 just from the cost of the parts and if we throw in all the other business overheads they're not seeing much of this £1,000 at all. I would assume they're getting some kind of wholesale discount somewhere along the line otherwise this just wouldn't be viable.
Have you seen that spec on chilblast for £1000?
 
System builders will get a discount on Windows however this is low margin area, otherwise, I am sure a number of us would be doing a couple of builds at the weekend for £400 :)

I'm thinking of dropping some cash on a kickass gaming rig.

I just reread this and sorry to disappoint but this is not going to be a "kickass" gaming rig. Not for around the £1k mark. The reason I say this if you compare the specs to a PS5 then they are not quite as good, particularly in the graphics department. The PC equivalent GPU apparently should be a 2070 or 2070 Super. So depending on which games you want you could spend £450 on a PS5 that would give you slightly better performance
 
I generally prefer to build my own, and often the warranty will be much longer than the two years Chillblast are offering. Take the PSU I'm just about to buy, it's comes with seven years warranty. After two years Chillblast will change it labour free, but charge you the cost of a new power supply which they will get replaced under warranty presumably.

Many hardware items have more than two years manufactures warranty.
 
I generally prefer to build my own, and often the warranty will be much longer than the two years Chillblast are offering. Take the PSU I'm just about to buy, it's comes with seven years warranty. After two years Chillblast will change it labour free, but charge you the cost of a new power supply which they will get replaced under warranty presumably.

Many hardware items have more than two years manufactures warranty.

The concern I have over warranty with a power supply is that it's the one component that can damage everything else. Let's say you buy a £35 PSU with a five year warranty and it fails and completely ruins your whole system and you go back to the manufacturer and they say "Ok, we're sorry our PSU damaged your £1,000 system, here's your £35".

I want a warranty that assumes full responsibility for the system (parts, build, the whole shebang) and the moment I get a problem I send it back for a repair/refund/replacement. I don't want to have to go in there at any point during the warranty; as far as I'm concerned hardware diagnostics and troubleshooting are their problems.
 
Any reason you need a DVD? They're generally not part of most pre-builds from what I've seen nowadays, usb or download is the main route..

A DVD burner is something I always like to have around. You never know when you might need it and I have a lot of legacy systems that still use optical media. It's also useful for old PC games that aren't available from Steam/GOG/Humble Bundle or whatever.
 
A DVD burner is something I always like to have around. You never know when you might need it and I have a lot of legacy systems that still use optical media. It's also useful for old PC games that aren't available from Steam/GOG/Humble Bundle or whatever.
Buy a USB one.
The concern I have over warranty with a power supply is that it's the one component that can damage everything else. Let's say you buy a £35 PSU with a five year warranty and it fails and completely ruins your whole system and you go back to the manufacturer and they say "Ok, we're sorry our PSU damaged your £1,000 system, here's your £35".

I want a warranty that assumes full responsibility for the system (parts, build, the whole shebang) and the moment I get a problem I send it back for a repair/refund/replacement. I don't want to have to go in there at any point during the warranty; as far as I'm concerned hardware diagnostics and troubleshooting are their problems.
I've had 2 power supplies fail and they have never taken out any other component.
I sent my 6 year old EVGA back to them as the fan was noisy (nothing else wrong with it). Add a new PSU within 10 days.
If this happened to you after 2 years you would have to buy a new PSU. Same if it killed all your components after 2 years
 
The concern I have over warranty with a power supply is that it's the one component that can damage everything else. Let's say you buy a £35 PSU with a five year warranty and it fails and completely ruins your whole system and you go back to the manufacturer and they say "Ok, we're sorry our PSU damaged your £1,000 system, here's your £35".

I want a warranty that assumes full responsibility for the system (parts, build, the whole shebang) and the moment I get a problem I send it back for a repair/refund/replacement. I don't want to have to go in there at any point during the warranty; as far as I'm concerned hardware diagnostics and troubleshooting are their problems.

Then don't buy a £35 PSU, if you get a good one (EVGA, Corsair, Seasonic etc) then its unlikely you will have a issue.
 
The time you are most likely to see a PSU blowing the rest of the PC up is during a lightning strike and in that case, you would probably need to claim on your home insurance.

You also seem to have quoted me when it's actually @Toasty on post 6 :confused:

I don't want to have to go in there at any point during the warranty; as far as I'm concerned hardware diagnostics and troubleshooting are their problems.


Most online companies will want to go through a level of diagnostics before accepting a return for repair\issue. So you will have to do some unless you buy from a local shop and just drop in it but you will pay even more for that.

Have a look at Linus Secret PC shopper, while I am not saying our UK suppliers are anything like that it gives you an idea of some typical calls you might go through.
 
£400 for labour😬. Surely if you’ve got experience with building PCs then why not put the £1000 behind building one yourself. You’ll get a more capable PC which you won’t need to upgrade in 12 months time as it’s struggling to run games. Or failing that check out some of the other building specialists that others have posted as they appear to be offering better value for money than Chillblast.
 
I had a rather old power supply fail recently, fitted a replacement, pc worked perfectly. My brother also had one fail, I'm sure that was all OK as well once replaced, although the system was so old he decided to build a replacement, but did test the old one.

It is of course your choice, I'm just putting my opinion out there.
 

Saw this small form factor PC from Scan advertised on Eurogamer, £1100 for a 5600X with a new 3060ti. That card is orders of magnitude better than the two year old 1650 you’ve been considering.

No one uses optical drives in 2021, so forget about that nonsense ;).
 
I've come up with a better build from PC Specialist (which actually works out cheaper than the one in my OP):

AMD Ryzen 5 3600XT CPU (6 cores at 4.5GHz base speed)
8GB AMD Radeon RX580
16GB Corsair Vengeance RAM (2x 8GB, DDR4, 3200MHz)
1TB PCIe SSD
24x DVD R/W optical drive
Corsair 750w RMx power supply
Stock PC Specialist case

Whole shebang comes to £994 inc. VAT. The RX580 seems to have a much lower price point than other GPUs of similar specs. Is there any particular reason for that?
 

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