So, I have been working on indexing my builds I did while I was at Fry’s and these are some data points that are pretty neat. Keep in mind that for the majority of that time, customers were not allowed to bring in outside parts and get the same labor price, so most opted to buy their parts at Fry’s. For the last 8 months or so that I was there, Fry’s was very low on stock of all parts. The only builds Fry’s got had some or all parts from the outside. The service department, at my urging, should not turn down any work. That all being said, these are pretty interesting stats nonetheless.
Today, we will look at the following components at a high level, what I mean by that is by manufacturer: CPU, GPU, RAM, Motherboard, and Case In the coming days, I will break down these into specific models and probably only the top 5 or 10 models. Some components have a large number of different models that Fry’s either sold or built PC’s using these parts. After that I will do some posts on various builds that I enjoyed. Building PC’s was the most fun part of the job, but every technician would say that. I don’t miss working at Fry’s but I do miss building PC’s. That’s why I have built and rebuilt my own PC a few times and jumped on the chance to build for family members that ask me to do so…
Right now, though, is a terrible time to buy PC parts.
Let’s now look at the glorious past.
Case
Thermaltake had the most by far. Not really sure why, but many of them were well built. Fry’s carried the most models of Thermaltake and always had them in stock. That probably contributed…
CPU
Ryzen came out around late 2017. I remember my first Ryzen build was for the store. As time went on, AMD started becoming more popular. Probably due to price-to-performance ratio. For my builds, Intel still wins
Motherboard
These are pretty even, but MSi takes the crown here. I became an MSi fanboy because of this… I really like their BIOS more than others. ASUS is pretty good, but I always hated Gigabyte. Just seemed harder to get the same things done in it than MSI or Asus. The outlier here is the ASRock. Fry’s didn’t sell ASRock the entire time I worked there. This one came from the outside and is used in my “YouTube” build. My favorite build from my time at Fry’s.
GPU
No contest. nVidia wins in a major landslide. nVidia had the mindshare and the RX500 series cards were deemed entry-level and the gamers wanted mid-level to high-level cards and AMD just couldn’t compete in that space. They are now with the RDNA and RDNA2 cards, but those didn’t exist when I was at Fry’s. So, since nVidia has so many, I broke that down just a bit to GPU platform and manufacturer
EVGA wins this hands down. They are an nVidia-only house. Makes quite a bit of sense they would be the most used brand in my builds.
And here we go… GTX 1070 and GTX 1060 are the big winners. The RTX cards didn’t coma out until 2018 and they were much higher priced than the GTX cards, so many still bought those over the RTX cards even when both were available. Mid-tier cards, 1060 and 1070. Entry level is like the 1050 and 1050Ti. Even those beat at the AMD cards.
And lastly…
RAM
Corsair dominated. Patriot is respectable, but Corsair killed it.
I had a total of 89 builds. Not everyone could I identify the part and in the case of GPUs, there were at least a half-dozen or more that there was no video card. Maybe the customer installed one later, I don’t know.
This has been a look at the breakdown of the brands and related data for the builds that I did personally. Did anything surprise you? Me, no. I am pretty sure that these matches my memories of the builds I did.
To the point of AMD, I have done only 3 builds outside of Fry’s and all three have been AMD as the CPU and GPU. This is partly due to my recommendations and my own experience. nVidia makes great GPUs and AMD is competing now with the big high-end cards.
That is all until Part 2.