cM :: MORLEY|DIGITAL

A little over three years ago I wrote an article summing up some of our experiences at [H] Consumer entitled Fear and Loathing in Lost Business. It was about the cut-throat PC market and how companies were succeeding and failing in a crowded niche.  That was about a month before I jumped back into the business myself, scoring a Director of Product Development position at fairly prominent boutique integrator.

If there’s anything that’s for certain, it’s that nothing stays the same for long in this business.  Since then VoodooPC has been bought and shut down, and OverdrivePC was acquired as well.  And Asus started to compete with its customers by introducing their own brand of laptops into the retail channel.

There was much gnashing of teeth because Asus, as one of the precious few ODMs that designs notebooks for the whitebook market, was bringing to market products that directly competed with their customers of said whitebook market.  It didn’t help that Asus-branded books usually were thinner, better looking, and better spec’d than the scraps that Asus fed the channel.  The Asus C90 is a good example of a piece of crap getting handed to the channel while Asus kept the good designs for themselves.

But I digress.  The other day it was brought to my attention that Asus was going to be bringing to retail a pre-built gaming system (If you’ll notice, this system is built in the same plastic toilet chassis that I have talked about on a couple of occasions) - the question posed in the email was “Is Asus a Supplier or a Competitor?”

Well, clearly Asus is trying to be both.

Should we, as builders of high performance, custom gaming computers be worried about this?  No.  What we do is so much more than the sum of the components.  What we do is focus on customer service.  Anyone can build a computer.  Few can build a business around building a high quality computer at a fair price and offering peace of mind day after day to their customers by building a rock solid reputation for quality and performance.

Just ask Shuttle.

Shuttle used to make mediocre motherboards.  Then they began to make these nifty little small form factor barebones kits that sparked a revolution in the industry.  Before long everyone was building Shuttle small form factor computers.  They sold so many that Shuttle decided it’d be a good idea to get in on the action and start selling pre-built systems.  So how’d that work out for them?  Well, nobody uses Shuttle barebones kits any more, and Shuttle doesn’t exactly bring home the best reviews.  And they’re not known for their customer service.

So it’s much more important to be able to stand behind your product and support it than just bring out the next Alienhead at a cheap price.  In the long run that is what is going to make or break you.

MAINGEAR will continue to use the best components on the market because that is what will best serve our customers.  We won’t cut off our customer’s noses to spite our competition’s face.

If that means we will continue to use Asus motherboards (amongst others) in order to get the best performance out there, then we will.  We bucked the Corsair trend and went with Kingston due to vastly superior product quality.  If we need to move away from Asus we will do so because we think it’s good for our customers, not because we want to get back at Asus (they wouldn’t care, believe me.)

And if our next Editor’s Choice Award comes from beating the bloody hell out of an Asus gaming PC using Asus’ own components, well then that will make the win that much sweeter.  ;)

A Phenom II X4 processor without a model number?  TWKR? 42? What does it all mean? The answer to life, the universe, and everything? Well, AMD culled these parts from their Phenom II X4 line that are supposed to overclock beyond the capabilities of the Phenom II X4 955.  They hand delivered these parts to us and we’re going to put them through the ringer.  Will they come out the other side as something truly special?  Should Dirk Meyer sign these before we put them in a system?  We’ll let you know as soon as we put them through our brutal Redline validation process…

Pics and more here!