Where I Buy Components

There are lots of websites with low-cost computer components. The best of these are very, very good. The worst of these are the stuff nightmares are made of. I will list sites I purchase from frequently or consult frequently. It's been Amazon (or sellers via Amazon) in the last couple of years. Before that, it was Amazon and Newegg. I also find deals at B&H Photo Video reasonably often, but usually when I'm in the market for home entertainment components and cameras. I have purchased a couple of monitors from them. Less occasionally, I pick up an item from Best Buy, but that usually consists of smaller items like cables. I've also been buying a few components directly from the manufacturers. 

I used to use Amazon or Newegg pretty evenly as sources for computer components. Before I became an Amazon Prime member, I favored Newegg. I purchased my first item - a book - from Amazon in 2000 and my first item from Newegg in 2001. However, before Amazon Prime, I bought less than a dozen things from them yearly. Newegg has diluted its concentration from computer components by selling other things like appliances and car parts, and they added 3rd-party sellers - some of which have been less than reliable and honest.

Newegg and Amazon have fantastic order tracking and a complete, searchable order history of my purchases. If I revisit a product page of an item I've purchased before, Amazon puts a link at the top saying when I bought it with a link to the order. That's something Newegg doesn't do, and it's pretty handy. Amazon has reasonable product search functionality, but Newegg has them beat by far. I often do product research on Newegg and buy from Amazon. Amazon's prices are usually the same or cheaper, but the free Prime shipping usually tips the scale.

Recently, Amazon started offering Sunday deliveries in addition to Saturday deliveries. On some occasions, I need something for work on Monday, and this is quite handy. I don't know the exact number of orders I have had with Amazon, but it's somewhere in the hundreds. I've returned a few items; one was lost during shipping. I had no hassles getting my money back.

Newegg was one of my favorite websites from which to buy computer components. At last check, I have placed over 100 orders with them ranging from $7 to $1400. How do I know this for sure? Like Amazon, every order I've placed with them is available in my account order history on their website. This includes a complete listing of everything I've purchased and how much I purchased it for. I've used this several times to check what products I put in which build. It's quicker to look this up online than to look through my files or pop off the side of a machine. It also makes it very easy to buy another item of the same item and put it in a different machine or recommend it to someone. My first purchase from Newegg was a Leadtek TI200/TDH GeForce3 Ti200 64MB AGP 4X Video Card, which I bought in October 2001 for $229. I'm sure it was a bargain at the time.

Newegg's Guided and Advanced Search are good at whittling down items, but the Power Search is the real winner. In mere seconds, I can reduce hundreds or thousands of potential components to the dozen or two that fit my build. No other site has search capabilities this broad. 

Newegg also has daily "Shellshocker" deals. That at least gets me to look at the site once a day during the week. (On the weekends, the deals tend to be on things other than computer-related items.) I've purchased several of the deals, and they are good—sometimes fantastic deals. Newegg also has a mobile app that features one special mobile-only deal a day, and that one usually is a very good deal.

I used to be such a Newegg fan I practically shopped nowhere else, however, in the last couple years, there have been a few chinks in the armor. It used to be that all orders I placed with Newegg arrived in two or three days - most of those with free shipping. Newegg has added "Super Saver" and "Standard" shipping options, which are often the only way to get free shipping nowadays. That's fine if the price is really good, and/or I'm OK if the item doesn't arrive for five to seven days. They've also started using the US Post Office for the Super Saver shipping. I get complete email tracking of when the order is accepted and charged and another (with tracking numbers) when it is shipped - until the USPS gets it. Then, I often get no tracking info until the item is delivered. That I am not happy with. I generally try to make sure to get the two to three-day shipping. If I can't get it that way from Newegg, I generally can get it from Amazon.

The second chink in the armor is that Newegg now allows other dealers to be listed in their searches and sell products through Newegg. In theory, that should be fine except that (at least for the things I am looking for), the prices of the other dealers are bad. Sometimes to the point of being laughable. The times when their other dealer's prices align with Newegg (or Amazon) are so few that I find their addition in the search results unwelcome noise. Oddly, having other sources like this is something Amazon has always done, but it doesn't bother me with them. There are several reasons why this is so, but at least I can check the Amazon Prime checkbox, which eliminates anyone who doesn't ship it for free and guarantees two-day shipping.

I've yet for Newegg to get an order wrong, but I have had to return a few items I bought, and RMAs are easy to request online. One item was a video capture card that refused to work with one motherboard. (I had purchased that video card before and had no issues with it.) I received refunds in about a week to two weeks. They charge a restocking fee, which I wasn't overly pleased with, but since they would have to sell the card (for less) as an open box item, it was not a great situation for anyone. It's not their fault the card was incompatible. (Not mine either.)

Even though I might have issues with Newegg, I've ordered hundreds of items since 2001. I wouldn't hesitate to ramp that up. They've yet to make a mistake on an order or be late shipping an order. My returns were handled fairly and efficiently. I've recommended Newegg to many friends, and those who purchased from them have the same experiences that I have. Very few companies online, or otherwise, run with this sort of quality.

Micro Center is my CPU and motherboard store. ... Next section.

No, that pretty much sums it up. If you are lucky enough to live near a Micro Center store, which I do, you can take advantage of their fantastic deals on CPUs. Depending on the CPU model, they are consistently $40 - $100 cheaper. You can get another $20-40 off a CPU/motherboard bundle if you aren't set on a specific motherboard. The motherboards offered in the bundle are pretty good ones, too. The catch is that these prices are in-store only; you have to go there and buy them in person. Of course, they hope to get you to buy other things (or everything) while in the store. They sometimes succeed, too. You must pay sales tax, but Amazon now collects that anyway, so that's not a factor. Every gaming PC I've made in the last 3-4 years has a CPU from Micro Center and often a CPU/Motherboard bundle.

B&H Photo Video is my first thought whenever I need audio or video equipment - especially cameras, projectors, A/V receivers, speakers, etc. Their catalogs - yes, they still mail out catalogs - are adult toy catalogs. In addition to all things audio and video-related, they sell computer components. While their prices are generally competitive, their selection is smaller than that of Amazon or Newegg, as components are not their focus. When I recently decided to upgrade to a higher-resolution monitor, I checked at B&H Photo Video since video-editing systems (and, therefore, monitors) are right up their alley. I found that B&H Photo Video had the monitor I was looking for, which was cheaper than Newegg and Amazon and had free shipping. (They didn't charge sales tax at the time, either.) They previously had a video card I was looking for that was cheaper, too.

PC Part Picker is not a place you can buy things from directly as it's not a store. However, it helps assemble a list of components with the least cost. The prices it quotes are the lowest of those taken from several stores it knows about. (The user can choose the store regardless of the cost.) The downside is that it doesn't have data about every single store. It has major ones like Newegg, Amazon, B&H Photo Video, and Micro Center. It also covers countries besides the US, like the UK, Australia, Spain, Germany, and Italy. I can't vouch for how good of a job it does for countries other than the US.

PC Part Picker tries very hard to ensure the components you put together when picking the parts for a system build are compatible. If you pick an Intel LGA 1700 socket CPU, the only motherboards offered later are those with an LGA 1700 socket. The memory offered will work with the motherboard, etc. It's getting pretty good at cross-checking. While picking each component, several filters are available that are specific to the component. They also have warnings, such as if a motherboard might need a BIOS update to be compatible with a CPU.