Corsair And GIGABYTE Are Getting Creative With Pre-Built PCs

One of my favourite urban legends is the story about how cake mixes were first a commercial failure because customers felt uneasy about putting a cake together with just powder and water. It’s not true, of course: sales of cake mixes doubled initially after World War 2, but that’s a whole other story.

I bring it up because for better or worse, the idea that people were more comfortable adding an egg and butter to their cake mix has stuck. And it turns out that Corsair, GIGABYTE and NVIDIA are pulling a similar trick with PC builds.

Retailers have been selling packages of parts for aeons now. The most common are those CPU/motherboard deals. Some of them come with RAM. Some might even come with a hard drive. But they’re basically your bog standard “upgrade” kit: here’s the new CPU you want, here’s a motherboard that supports the CPU’s socket, and a few extras to go with it.

The other route for those too lazy to build their own PC in the first place: a pre-built system. It’s always fun when someone else does it for you, but you’re often charged a premium.

Corsair, GIGABYTE and NVIDIA are teaming up to do something slightly different. It’s basically a full PC for $1099, with the difference being that you build it yourself — and if you need help, there’s a three-part video series on how to put it together.

The $1099 build is being sold as Centre Com, Umart, PLE and PC Case Gear and has the following specs:

Intel i3-6100 CPU
Corsair 8GB DDR4 RAM
Corsair 128GB SSD
Western Digital 1TB Blue HDD
Corsair Obsidian 250D Case
Corsair VS550 power supply
GIGABYTE GA-150N Phoenix motherboard
GIGABYTE NVIDIA GTX 950 GPU

It’s not a bad little rig, provided you don’t try to max all the settings out and run your games at 4K. It’ll be demoed at RFLAN in Curtin University tomorrow, if you’re going, and there’s even a video online of how to do some simple vinyl modding if you want to trick it out further.


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