Build or Buy Sager/Clevo Which is better

I was wondering what people's opinions where on wether it would be better to build your own Sager/Clevo (considering the Clevo P170HM or X7200) VS going with a reseller and building a premade.

I am fairly computer Savvy as that is what I do for a living, I know that with the resellers you get the warranty. But dont most computer parts (ie. CPU's/GPU's/Motherboards) come with there own Warranty's?

Any Thought would be great... I have around $2000 to spend so I could easily go with a reseller just trying to get an idea the pros and cons of each.

Thanks for taking the time to help out!!

 

no idea about the warranty part, but it would seem logical to build your own if u could so u dont have to deal with sales reps and having to wait if your laptop if it broke. but if u do decide to go to a reseller i would recommend one of the companies that has an account here, kind of made me think that they care about their products. thats why i decided to order my new laptop from mythlogic i heard nothing but good things in this forum about them.

 

If you build your own yo obviously get the gratification of building your own laptop and you will save a minimal amount money.

However on the warranty side, it could take much longer for repairs or warranty work. Sager is the main North American seller of Clevo and if your motherboard or any other part of your barebones unit fails you could be out several weeks as anything WITHOUT the Sager name on it unfortunately is treated as a low priority and much further behind anything with the Sager Name on it. Additionally if you have a problem that is hard to troubleshoot you will get little to no help from the manufacturers of the components. Most often you will be on your own in this department. One other thing to keep in mind is if you have to send a Hard drive, Ram or CPU back for repair or replacement it could take longer for this process to be completed also. Obviously us sellers that sell these parts by the thousand have clout with them and can get replacements and repairs done very quickly. You also have a centralized warranty contact versus contacting several places to narrow down a problem or get it fixed.

A perfect example is if a RAM Dimm or something related to the SATA connector fails and you believe it is the RAM iteself or the Hard Drive. You can easily waste several weeks sending back your hard drive or RAM to find out those are not the problem and when you eventually send the laptop back to Sager and they get to your repair you could easily be out 1-2 months of using your laptop.

Since Sager is the North American service center unfortunately many customers can lose if their machine is not Sager Branded. Sager Branded machines always receive the utmost urgency with completing repairs.

Hope this helps with your decision...

 

If it was a desktop, where parts are cheap and abundant, I'd definitely build the machine. Unfortunately, we're dealing with laptops, where parts are hard to come by and are very expensive. For a laptop, I'd definitely have a reseller make it.

BTW: XoticPC is awesome. Just thought I'd put that out there. Definitely consider them when making your purchase.

 

I was in the boat as you... I used to work for a system builder, and I've always built/serviced by own computers.

Here were my reasons for going with a reseller:
1. Price difference is minimal (my config was less than 5% difference)
I priced my parts on rjtech.com (using my old left over parts like OCZ Vertec 2 and 500GB SATA2), but the savings was minimal compared to a reseller. If you're building a $2000-3000 machine and savings is less than 5-10%, why bother with the headache or risk if you break something during install? Plus, most resellers will allow you to remove hardware/OS which completely negate the benefit of a parts build.
2. Reseller support - it only took about 14 days of reading THIS FORUM to find that all the resellers that post here are TOP NOTCH. IF you buy the individual parts, you wont get much after-sale support, but you can tell from the posts on this forum that the resellers actually care about your business and your satisfaction.
3. Warranty support - using a reseller to handle your warranty returns (especially for the Sandy Bridge recall) with Sager is much better than you personally trying to coordinate it.

For me, when it came down to saving $100 or paying $100 for piece of mind that I'll receive a quality, pre-built system backed by a great reseller that will give me many years of service... it was an easy decision.

 

Hey,

Yea we do all of our own warranty work on our machines. We just get parts in that we need to fix them so you never have to worry about getting a laptop from us and then sending it somewhere else to fix it. Even motherboard swaps and other hard to do issues we take care of 100% of warranty issues in-house. Means we can turn things even quicker if there is ever an issue.

 

Unlike with desktops, there really aren't too many advantages to building your own Clevo notebook.

For starters, if you price out all of the parts - I doubt you can save very much over purchasing a fully configured system. The few people who do decide to build their own notebook usually have some of the parts already and that's how they save money.

Secondly, if you ever have to warranty the barebone - I don't think any reseller offers free shipping on the service work, so you would have to pay all of the shipping, unlike if you purchase a fully configured system - where all shipping charges are covered.

Thirdly, if you purchase a fully configured system - all of the warranty will be consolidated in one place, making it much easier and quicker to have parts replaced/serviced, than if you were to purchase everything separately and assemble the notebook yourself.

Fourthly, the technical support. You might have limited troubleshooting help from your reseller, if you only purchase a barebone from them and purchase everything else separately.

I hope that helps.

Firstly, Sager is a distributor for Clevo's notebooks not Sager's. Secondly, if Sager did discriminate between their customers as you say they do, then that would be unethical. Thirdly, I'm sure Clevo wouldn't even allow Sager to discriminate between who gets the Clevo replacement parts, even if Sager wanted to do it.

So, I expect you to provide some evidence to back up this outrageous claim, otherwise you need to retract it, because it's false!

 

Maybe you need to check with your Rep Malibal, it is a fact that Sager prioritizes their branded machines ahead of others. Clevo is only the ODM. Think about it, it's their own brand, wouldn't you protect your own brand ahead of a barebones builder that doesn't have your name on it?

We started out in the early years as a builder and switched for many reasons, which obviously this is one of them.

 

Actually, I have asked Sager if they prioritize Sager branded Clevo notebooks over Non-Sager branded Clevo notebooks when they handle the parts / service for warranty work, and they said that they absolutely do not prioritize Sager over Non-Sager as you have stated here. Sager said that they don't even look to see whether or not it's a Sager or Non-Sager branded Clevo notebook.

Anyone who would like to confirm this can call Sager tomorrow at: (800) 669-1624. Ask for Tony, and he will tell you the exact same thing I have just stated.

 

Hmmm, I wonder why Sager has approved ours & others advertising of this then for the last year or more?

Regardless it is what it is.

 

In answer to the original poll question, it all depends on whether you hunt for parts and barebone resellers or not.

I hunt for graphics cards.
Sometimes I can get an extremely high end card for less than half of the market price, and 1/3 the price from a reseller.

In that situation it saves a ton of money. However, RJtech is the only builder that will offer barebones without the graphics card AFAIK.
Correct me if I'm wrong...

Anyway I can't stress enough that it is possible to save a lot of money, so I'll just say it, I got a gtx 470m for 200$. It wasn't a one time deal.
There are companies out there that really don't know what they're doing and get very high end cards somehow.
I (would) like having a builder who I can trust in contrast to graphics (wild) cards which may need some work to get functional... but I haven't bought a laptop new in a few years.

 

Hey i got one question for you guys at Mythlogic

Do you guys import the Clevo parts directly from Clevo or from another NA importir ?

 

Buy pre-built. Even if you have a few components, get a couple quotes from resellers / builders and see the price and if they can remove those components. In general I have found them to be comparable if not cheaper overall.

 

Hey we don't get things directly from Clevo (They require a minimum order of 1000 pieces a month to get directly from them, and we don't have that volume.... yet )


So we import them from a variety of guys around the world, some from NA and one from Europe.