Games

On, Sunday, our sister site Tom’s Guide (which is a different publication targeted at less-tech-savvy readers), published an op-ed from writer Dave Meikleham claiming that building PCs is "a mistake"

I'm glad that article got called out. I would have been embarrassed to publish that on a tech site. Such a poor take. Like I get his point, but he pretty much broke the machine himself, then talked about how a laptop "just works". Well it only "just worked" because you weren't able to break it because you can't take the thing apart to upgrade or repair it.

My last PC build had a GTX 1060 that I bought at the time for $330.

My most recent one has an RTX 3060Ti and I paid over $700 for it 😭

If GPU prices don’t come down it’s going to be cheaper and smarter for me to buy a prebuilt PC, at least where I live.

Building your own gaming machine was always the best option if you knew about new technologies, compatibilities, brands etc. The problem I see these days is that the market is really, really saturated in everything PC. Which makes the research necessary extensive and time consuming for people who are not exactly "on the pulse" when it comes to hardware.

So it also becomes a question of "do I want to spend the time to get exactly what I need for the cheapest possible price?" versus just checking some meta-sites that review prebuilt PCs and pick one that is rated good by the community instead.

My desktop has a Sapphire RX 480 with 8 GB of VRAM and plug and play replaceable fans. I paid $260 for it at the end of 2016. For what that card was capable of (fuck, still is capable of) for us to be at 8 GB 4060s and 7600s is disgusting. I mean three years prior to that I paid $299 for a fucking 7950 with 3 GB of VRAM.

If you wanna buy a pre-built, get a laptop instead. I laid this out in another comment on the subject. $100 each for RAM, PSU, Storage. $200 2k 165hz monitor. $300 CPU, $300 GPU. Not a bad rig? Add $200 for portability and you have a $1300 gaming laptop with a 5800x and 6700xt. $200 to be able to easily carry it with you is definitely worth it. Cause if you want a SFF desktop for portability you're gonna struggle to get it done for the same price point.

Could I have thrown down $2k instead of $1.3k to get a stronger desktop? You bet, but it'd be sitting in the corner used as much as my desktop is now because it's just not convenient for me at this stage in my life. The device I can carry with me to work, my living room, my bedroom, and everywhere in between is the device I'm going to use. I'd much rather it be a laptop than just my phone.

I've found lately GPUs are the only thing that's way out of line price wise. CPUs are as reasonable as ever, SSDs and RAM are cheaper than they've ever been. If you're willing to go for a last gen GPU you can get a great deal on the used market. I don't think the situation is nearly as dire as this time last year.

If youcre building for gaming, personally I'd advise aganist building a high end PC however.

Most AAA releases suck. Buggy, broken, soulless, rushed. There is no point in chasing high end hardware that can run them.

The pre-built I've ordered will come with an AMD 5600G APU, sufficent for most if not all indie releases.