alt Hacker NewsDISCLAIMER: Only speaking for myself, not employers or affiliates.
I've been pretty darn happy with the Puget Systems custom workstation I ordered last year before the memory craze started (especially since it has 192GiB of DDR5).
I also ordered another family member a custom "Tiki" system from Falcon Northwest and that has also been quite excellent from what I've seen and they've told me.
Now is obviously not the most economical time to order a new system, but when it is appropriate (and for what it's worth) I think those are two great system builders.
I wouldn’t count them as a big vendor, but I’ve only heard good things. Local shops around here charge like $99 to put a machine together, install an OS and run burn in testing. You get more choice than an outfit like puget, but less carefully tested part / cooling selection, etc.
The last I checked, the really big players tended to add value add gimmicks (water cooling is a common one, custom psu form factors are another) with reliability / compatibility issues. That’s the tier to avoid, not the Puget systems of the world.