Compaq used to sell insanely expensive and over-engineered PCs. I seem to remember my company paying $30k for a desktop PC from Compaq in the early '90s.
Compaq had very good WORKSTATIONS and SERVERS, but their PCs have always been cheap. I distinctly recall their later 90's PCs, which were non-standard over-sized motherboards, with all (cheap junk) components integrated onto them. They were right along side companies like Packard Bell in the race to the bottom.
Their workstations and servers, however, were always very nice. They used large fans, with plastic ducting, multiple thermal zones, etc, decades ago. They got the benefit of all that DEC engineering expertise and experience when they bought up the remnants of the company.
The same should be said of HP as well. Their desktop PCs were junk, but their workstations were heavily over-engineered and well-designed. I remember late 90's ~200MHz HP Workstations with numerous slots for memory, and a riser card that gave 6 PCI slots, as well as 2 ISA slots, which kept those PCs expandable and relevant far after their expected shelf life. Little touches like only two levers to pull to completely remove the case made them a pleasure to work with, as well.
And to Compaq and HP's credit, when HP bough the company, they dropped their own Netserver line, and rebranded the Compaq Proliant as the HP Proliant server, and that has now become the best selling x86 server brand out there, so they did something right. Though I'm still fairly annoyed at the licensing, limitations and clumsy proprietary tools to interface with their iLo out-of-band management.