Avoid at all costs. The owner deletes negative feedback regardless, and Yelp and Facebook seem to be allowing it. I have worked in technology for the past five years, and when a family member told me that their Custom Gaming computer purchased at Affordable Computer was crashing constantly, I offered to take a look. I was shocked to see that all of the parts in the computer, except the graphics card, were recycled from a Best Buy computer sold three years ago. They paid $1200 for a "custom built gaming computer" with NEW parts, not something that was already several years old. It was pretty easy to see that this was the reason this computer was crashing every time it loaded the game.
When confronted with all of this, the owner Steve staged a shouting match both in his store and on the phone. He called me, my mother-in-law, and brother-in-law every insult in the book, some of which I haven't heard in ten years. Jack***. Yahoo. Kid. Buddy. Liar. Jerk. When asked about the specific issues, trying to move past this in favor of any kind of solution, he got even more aggressive and defensive, frequently changing the subject by hurling insults at one of us.
He claimed that we were either harassing him or, or "trying to part the computer". He also claimed it is not their fault, as they do not know anything about gaming computers or the game he is playing. Their ad on Facebook a week ago is centered around gaming computers. He also asked if my brother-in-law was jealous that his other friends had a better gaming computer. Which, I'm not sure how that makes sense. They built the computer. Are they insulting themselves? To cap it off, Steve threatened to punch me in the face. In person. At that point, we had to leave and accept our loss because I was pretty sure he was ready to do it. You can't make this stuff up.
This is, by a landslide, the worst experience I've had with any business. Sad to see so many people continue to be scammed by this company - this is not the first person I know that has had issues. Hoping the Better Business Bureau will soon step in, or Yelp will allow users to actually review the companies they've had negative experiences with.
EDIT:
I'm going to put the technical details of what was wrong with this computer below, since Yelp has let this live for now:
First, without opening the computer at all, we were able to get the make and model of the motherboard via a simple command prompt line. If you're curious, the brand is Asus M51BC. After searching it online, we found that this particular motherboard had only been used in one computer - a store tower model that has been sold since 2013. Specifically, this one (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883220445). We thought this was strange, considering the owner had promised to order every individual part and custom tailor the computer to his gaming needs.
So we did more digging. Device Manager gave us the name of the hard drive, which after searching online, found out returned us the same $400 computer from Newegg. We then checked the RAM through System Properties, and found out that while the 8GB stick was from the same stock computer, he nonsensically must have put in another 4GB, from a completely different company, in the same computer. Mind you, there are not many ways I know of to test the compatibility of a stock computer vs another stock computer. Many of the sites that do this do not even list the parts associated with this build. So I'm not sure how / if he did that, but the point is moot. 12GB of RAM is not enough to handle most modern games, let alone 8 and a possibly not compatible 4.
After that, we checked the processor through command prompt, and found that it ALSO came from the same stock computer (AMD FX-8300). In fact, the only part that did not come from the stock computer mentioned above, was the rogue 4GB of RAM and a graphics card from a completely different stock computer that may or may not be completely compatible. Regardless of any of this, none of these parts, if they were brand spankin new and not three years old (and probably used), would be worth the amount of money we paid.
After all of this, we opened up the computer case (which was cracked, by the way) and found that all of the serial numbers matched what we had already known. To make it worse; the hard drive has a big fat '2012' etching on the info. That was the first piece of hardware to fail.
If there's any questions on that, let me know. We have pictures of the parts now, that can confirm all of this. This is what you get at Affordable Computers. read more
