Nvidia Eases Users into DIY Scene with GeForce PC Kit

"All the benefit of not getting to custom choose each part, the fun of paying the one price we dictate, and the added excitement of having to put it together yourself while you learn what static electricity does to memory chips."

Ohhh... that's why I'm not an Ad-man.

Yes that is a very good point 3vi1. However; for an initial builder it is positive I guess. Even tough as you note it in several ways takes away from the experience considerably to me and you. To a brand spanking new builder, or a customer who see's this they might then say I could do that, and become over time like many of us. I have built many PC's over the years, and worked on thousands. But, for many it is a daunting task to enter in to. So I can see this as a good thing, although I think the component particularly the MB, Memory amount, and CPU are also putting a customer who buys this at a direct and initial disadvantage. There is also the confidence in knowing there getting all the right parts as well as, and as I said before building there first PC. I personally love building them (I still need to do a fully custom built MOD case), but an initialization to building for a general consumer this is good.

I see your point, and don't disagree... I'm just afraid that people using this won't actually learn anything about picking components and will therefore know almost as little as when they started.  It seems to me that the best thing about building your own system is all the incidental knowledge you gain through research while trying to understand the various standards.

:D this was in the newsletter they sent out by email a few days ago. I wouldn't buy this but for some one that wants to put the parts together themselves but not choose the parts its alright i guess.

Yeah I agree with both of you on this. Some of the funnest parts of putting together a system at least to me is selection. I could probably put one together with my eyes closed in a half hour except for applying thermal to the CPU. But finding out whats awesome, but still in my budget, and then ordering it and building the best I can is the best part of the whole thing. For a fresh new builder though who just wanted to grab there first system with no issues I see the point in it.

by the way a quote from origin pc "Just because anyone can build a PC, doesn't mean they should" lol

Wow are those lousy specs or what.    As mentioned, this defeats the purpose of DIY as a whole.  Half the work is done for you, especially seating the heatsink.

>If we think back to our very first build, most of us would agree that the concept was a little daunting at first, at least until it came time to dive in and plug all the parts in.

"Until?" Try until, during, and after. I thought I had foreseen all of the problems I'd run into in my first complete build; then ran into the Megahalems vs. RAM heatsink issue, the fact that the USB and Firewire PCI cards' internal headers stuck out so much that I couldn't put them next to each other; and the reluctance of the case's tool-free design to work with a double-width graphics card.

Of the whole process, though, I'd have to say that the greatest challenge was installing the CPU and heatsink. Spreading on just enough thermal paste, wondering if I got it right... I can definitely see the market for a product like this. And hey, the confidence it gives you will lead you to build a system completely from scratch that has an actual state-of-the-art CPU! (The old one can be used for L4P.) For five hundred beans, it bets what some of the system builders are trying to push.

To me, this seems pretty similar to what Newegg is offering in terms of their bundles. Instead of like a 2 item bundle, they started doing bundles that include pretty much everything (just like this Nvidia kit). The nice one about Newegg is that it at least has a good number of bundles at different price points.