Yes, you can build your own computer.
You can also make your own furniture.
The question is whether you would want it in your living room.
If it’s a choice between a Cerise Computer and one made by Izzy’s “friend” in his basement, I know which one I would choose.

What do you do when the hard drive goes belly up? New Egg has zero tech support and their hard drive warranty lasts a whole 30 days. The hard drive manufacturer will give you a refurbished drive after that time.

We haven’t even gone into the 30 other components that make up your computer. What would your friend do then? My suspicion is that your friendship would become pretty strained if you started pushing him to do your warranty replacement.

That’s the beauty of a buying a computer from a custom shop like Cerise. Everything is in the US under one roof and believe me, if you did have a hardware problem, they would turn it around a lot faster than your friend can.

So if you have a lot of time on your hands and a good friend like Izzy has, get your friend to build your next workstation.

For everyone else, do yourself a massive favor and get it from a custom shop like Cerise.

HOWEVER…is it a great machine for someone who lacks, or simply doesn’t care about, the experience or know-how to make a wiser investment?
YES.

On that note, Great review Bruce:)

To justify the extra grand pricetag, if it’s got 24-hour LOCAL support, then thats probably worth it to some over the long haul, if not most.

Yet another reason why so many people buy Macs because of the support structure for those not willing or knowledgeable make it truly a strong/fast and efficient machine they REALLY want to use daily.
…and in reality, that’s perfectly fine:)

**On the topic of 64bit goodness:

I also agree with Gianluca.

I do high-end compositing and vfx work, and after seeing Vista 64bit Ult. tackle my heavier-than-normal work requirements, I’ll never go back to a 32bit OS.

My box specs are quite a bit more powerful than the above however it is FAR cheaper:
-Tyan Server board (to run my dual quad-core procs for a total of 8-cores)
-16gigs of low-latency ram
-lianli server tower case
-server mobo
-hardware raid card for both of my Seagate raid arrays.
(6 drives total with 2 for a raid Zero boot, and 4 for my raid Zero speedy & redundant storage array)
-Fibre controller card for my external JBOD working array.
-Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS – soft-quatro’ed to unlock its’ Quatro 4600 hardware capability.
(safely saving $1500 in the process)
-and a few various optical drives.

Grand total? Less than $2500 brand new
from Newegg.com
All brand-names, all warrantied, etc.

….I already owned 2 dell 24″ widescreens but got those @ $220 a piece from Dell.com last year.
(they are even cheaper now)

The trick to making my rig efficient and bulletproof, i.e. worth the trouble, was having a friend that knows what they are doing to build it SPECIFICALLY for what I do.

Not many folks know someone that REALLY knows what they are doing when it comes to higher-end hardware/software configs, so I believe most of the problems we hear out there with others having issues with home-builds boil-down to lack of experience in actual configuration for a specific task.

One cannot just go out and buy a machine and expect it to do REALLY hardcore fluid/dynamics simulation, or be able to scrub though uncompressed 2k plates without knowing what they are doing, or realizing why they are doing it.

Again, great review Bruce:)