costco often have very good prebuilds for the price
still more than building yourself, but often cheaper than microcenter for similar builds

or if its on sale/clearance it can be less than its parts alone

cyberpower builds themselves are good, but be sure to update bios first
then wipe the drive and install the os from a usb stick to remove any preinstalled crapware
then boot to bios and enable xmp and test that its stable

For that budget, you can build a great PC yourself if you are willing to put in the effort and time. You could select the parts and they would build it for you. For prebuilts, I suggest the Costco option due to their great return policy as you mentioned yourself.

Source by your price range and find the best specs.

Whichever one has an in person return policy and sells PCs with standard parts.

My first gaming PC was a rebuilt, which i started upgrading from there. Like I put an SSD in it. Then extra RAM, then I added a better GPU.

That is how I eventually got into building my own.

If you’re in the USA, Cost Plus Gaming and Andromeda Insights are both well priced and pretty high quality for what you pay as far as prebuilts go.

Before you buy your pre-build, look into if it uses any proprietary tech or anything within it, so that once you're more familiar with PC hardware, if you want to upgrade, you're able to.

I bought a pre-built before I got super into hardware (it was my starting point), and I've been able to upgrade a lot but the motherboard is proprietary so if I want to upgrade my PSU or Motherboard, I have to fully replace them both. Which is a major undertaking.

Just be sure to check, because in a year or two if you understand your PC better and wanna upgrade you wanna make sure you can.

My experience with Cyberpower was pretty good, however I purchased it five years ago.

I think most of the negativity regarding PC builders is people who think A up charge of putting the components together and configuring the systems are too high. My cyberpower PC was about 200-300 dollar up charge above the cost of the components if I built the computer myself at the time with all brand new parts online.

Paying people to do it costs money.

My Cyberpower uses a really awesome case built by Coolermaster and according to cyberpower's website still markets it. https://www.cyberpowerpc.com/store/item/cs-454-109 I would search for a computer with this case if you plan on possibly diving into the hobby more.

I would say, sort by your budget and purchase one that makes sense for you. You have the amazing costco return policy to fall back on if it doesn't shake out for you.

Definitely recheck it, make sure all cables are snugged up - seen a few cyberpower and affiliate builds quite messy / rushed out the door

building them yourself is much cheaper and isnt that hard, you only need to do it for a few hours and its done and u will save yourself hundreds and get a much better PC along with learning skills about PCs and how they work/ made
would recommend

Nice

I will agree with custom builds being superior to pre-builds (and also cheaper).

Custom pre-builds are better but you still run the risk of them using cheap parts and the prices can be even higher. If the place is not local, they like to ship the entire PC with GPU installed, which is not a great idea as it could crack the Motherboard.

I don't understand why they do not ship the GPU separately. Some local stores, such as Microcenter, won't even ship a CPU by post let alone a GPU.

Fry's Electronics should never have become a food store (grocery chain) instead of a PC hardware parts store, thanks Covid. Their warehouse (store) for PC parts were HUGE but I see where the grocery chain idea came from as they already had a Starbucks and the size of their warehouse stores were often compared to Kroger (another grocery chain).

Originally posted by Ayiar:

building them yourself is much cheaper and isnt that hard, you only need to do it for a few hours and its done and u will save yourself hundreds and get a much better PC along with learning skills about PCs and how they work/ made
would recommend

My first build took 5 hours because I was overly careful, the second build took one hour but I tell ya, installing/updating the software always takes a few hours.

Originally posted by Ayiar:

building them yourself is much cheaper and isnt that hard, you only need to do it for a few hours and its done and u will save yourself hundreds and get a much better PC along with learning skills about PCs and how they work/ made
would recommend

but if something dont work its a pain in the ass to find the reason out.
And you dont know what part is broken.
When its a prebuild you just return all.

Originally posted by The 3 Whites:

Originally posted by Ayiar:

building them yourself is much cheaper and isnt that hard, you only need to do it for a few hours and its done and u will save yourself hundreds and get a much better PC along with learning skills about PCs and how they work/ made
would recommend

but if something dont work its a pain in the ass to find the reason out.
And you dont know what part is broken.
When its a prebuild you just return all.

diagnosing hardware issues is super easy compared to software issues
its really not difficult so long as u follow instructions to the book and diagnose issues by individual components if something goes wrong