111desingn was founded in 2001 as means to an end.  Sometime in the late 80’s I began to DJ and like all dj’s i had to have flyers.  So, i began a sub career in Graphic Design (flyers, posters, handbills, stickers, buttons, etc..).  People, bands, clubs, etc… seemed to enjoy my style of artwork /design aesthetic and began to contract me to do work for them.  At some point i grew weary of being on the road 24/7 and started investing more time in Graphic Design.  I began taking on larger projects like corporate identities, logos, package design, book design, tattoos, and websites.   Web design began way back in the early HTML days.  Eventually the majority of the web work i was doing was advanced Flash & CSS.

My clients included everything from non-profits to small business to large corporate & public entities.  Those clients eventually lead me full circle… back to custom computer builds, servers, networks and the like.

One day I realized I enjoy building custom PC’s more than anything else I’d been doing in many years. I wanted to provide a service differently than other system builders.  After some time i came up with a winning solution  and 111Tech custom systems was born.

At 111tech our philosophy is simple:  Build the best computer our clients can afford.

Our clients tell us how much they can afford to spend, and we build the best machine for their needs with that budget. We keep up to date with current and future technologies.  We do the research so our clients don’t have to.
On a side note, we do not keep a parts inventory.  We order the parts when our clients are ready to purchase. What this means is: our customers pay the latest (aka the lowest) prices for their parts. This bit of information is extremely important, because computer parts and their respective prices generally decrease over time.  No parts inventory means our clients are not locked to a price that we paid (and therefore must charge). They always get the latest pricing on name brand parts.

With every build, we recommend parts to our customers based on our research & experience.  However, frequently our customers desire a part that has little verifiable information or reviews on the web.   We see this as an opportunity to investigate and provide that information here.

Its 2010 and for us it is time to begin offering some honest unbiased information, how to’s, reviews, and opinions.

Whats honest unbiased mean?  It means real hands on experience and our uninfluenced impressions & experiences.

We don’t get anything from the manufacturers for review.  We get our parts from the same publicly commercial sources that anyone can purchase from.   Nearly everything we receive is via a client order and our reviews reflect our impressions based on what we see when we use it for their build.   We are not going to be posting new reviews or information that is already available through a number of other tech sites, unless our experience differs from what they are reporting.

Lets be honest, some tech reviews will have a positive or negative slant because the reviewer would like to keep receiving free merchandise from the manufacturer for review.  We all like free stuff.  It goes without saying, but I’m going to say it anyway, a manufacturer is less likely to send a product out for review if the reviewer has bashed other products.  We don’t have any of those temptations as our customers are the ones purchasing the product for themselves.  At 111design we base our reviews on what we observe while it was passing through our workbenches while keeping the clients identity private.

We’ll be posting soon and often to share our thoughts to help people make better educated decisions.