PCSpecialist is sometimes also rebranded Clevo, for notebooks at least. Saying that from personal experience. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing for me. Their support is really good. E.g. once the delivery people f**ed up, PCS offered a discount due to the chassis damage or, because I didn’t want it, accepted the product back and even paid me 50’EUR for the inconvenience. Not every company would do that. But it’s a choice, digging up and buying the underlying hardware (cheaper) is also sensible.

You’re speaking about ThinkPenguin right? Haven’t touched it in quite some years, admittedly. Don’t know how things are now. I do like how they used to offer disabling Intel ME during purchase. And that notebook worked out-of-the-box fullly, no exceptions such as keyboard backlight or internet or you name it. But again, dunno about the state of things now.

What are you looking for? What are your requirements? I mean, gaming? Programming (if “yes”, do your projects require lots of running services/containers?)? Which country are you in?

In Europe, I like using PCSpecialist a lot. They offer thorough customization of the hardware, and their prices are good (they start low, and it gets even lower because they allow you cutting Windows out of the bill). In the US I’ve bought a ThinkPenguin and was happy with it. I didn’t really like my custom-configured Toshiba back in the day. It had weak cooling and was thus very noisy, and it wasn’t done well, deteriorated with time a bit too much.