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.
Wow that sucks. Pcpartpicker has 3060 ti’s ~$370 now
My heart bleeds.
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.
There was a period where you could not find the 3000 series NVidia cards unless you went prebuilt. Other than that, I agree, always built all my machines after my first 286.
I think the right way to go is fine a good local computer store with knowledgeable people and get their help parting out and assembling it. You get some repair coverage and benefits like that, they do the bulk of the work, and you can put your own options in on anything you’re knowledgeable about. It’s what I’ve done and it’s well worth it for the small extra cost.
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.
Upvoted because i love the breakdown on this comment.
I got an Asus rog g15 amd advantage edition for about $1700 incl tax in India, and it has all the things you mentioned and a 6800M GPU.
The thing has a really great battery life for a gaming notebook and i can get so much stuff done as well on it for my side gig.y only complaint about it is the fan, which can get really loud, but Im fine with the tradeoff.
I also daily drive a macbook m1 pro courtesy of the office and I equally love it.
Other than the GPU market, most of the PC components are relatively cheap compared to yesteryears.
That’s the exact laptop I’m talking about. Caught mine on a deal for like $1300 before taxes.
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.
After building a PC for the first time a few years ago, I’ll never buy a pre-built desktop again (low or high end)
The amount of corners they cut and terrible design decisions they make just so you can’t reuse the parts elsewhere are not only criminal from a consumer perspective, but an environmental one as well
Love watching GamersNexus pre-built pc reviews. Check it out if you haven’t. Confirms everything you just said.
I’ve got mine through an online wizard of sorts, so I have picked almost all of the parts. And I understand your point of view but this is all I can afford at the moment, I didn’t want to try to build my own PC for the first time and somehow screw it up.
I get your concern, I was extremely worried my first time. It’s a lot easier than you might expect though
Still, it’s your money and your comfort. If it’s worth the extra money for a pre-built to save you peace of mind, by all means do as you will
I’ve found being a patient gamer really pays off. I have a relatively powerful machine but I don’t generally play any games that haven’t been out for several months to a year. By then they usually work, in my experience, pretty flawlessly. Anything I’m interested in anyway. Which are pretty exclusively single-player story-driven games.
Fair enough, but not all of those games’ problems are technical. A lot of them just either fundamentally suck, or are technically well built but don’t offer anything truly interesting.
I understand this is subjective; but why would I want to play Ghost of Tsushima when I could be playing Hades, Hotline Miami or Undertale?
Oh no for sure I love a good indie game too. It’s just that if the ONLY reason someone would stay away from AAA games are due to the initial bugs and whatnot then they should try coming back after they’re fixed up a bit. But absolutely nothing wrong with not being interested and just rocking out some indie games.
