I want to escape consoles and finally build a gaming pc but I’ve seen the prices…
Everything is really overwhelming for me and I have no clue what I should go for and everyone is giving me differing answers so I ask you.
Is building a PC ACTUALLY cheaper than buying one?
What specs would I even need? All I wanna do is play arc raiders comfortably at high settings and play heavily modded Garry’s mod.
Building your own used to be a lot cheaper.
If you live near a Best Buy (or wherever you’re seeing prebuilt computers for sale), take a picture of the shelf tag with the specs. Alternatively, since it runs Windows 11, go to Start (Windows flag) → System, scroll all the way down to About. It’ll tell you what CPU it has and how much RAM. You might be able to find the GPU stuff here. A little help, Windows guys? Mac user here but I use a PC at work and I generally know my way around them. Take a picture of that.
Now go to PCPartPicker.com and try to build a system around that.
Building a PC isn’t hard, but it’s not easy either. I’d call it an intermediate skill. I would recommend against listening to anyone who says it’s easy. It may be easy for them but they may be setting you up for expensive failure. And now computers are largely sold water cooled. That’s cool and all, but I’ve built PCs across two decades, and I’ve never built with a water cooler. If I were gonna get a gaming PC again, I’d go prebuilt. Just save myself the hassle.
Look at what they cost. Save up the money or get your money ready. If you see a computer you want and the price looks fair, go for it.
Look for open box deals. You really don’t want a computer that’s been worked hard and hung up wet, as it were. Store computer displays rarely get worked, though. If anything, they get dirty. So you clean the thing. I wouldn’t use an open box keyboard, though. I’d be looking for a deal on just the computer that was out for people to play with. Mostly they just shake the mouse and bang on the keyboard a bit. Hit the web browser. The wise gamer is going to nuke and pave anyway — that means, when you get it home, before you put it on your network, you’re gonna wipe the drive and reinstall Windows (or better yet Linux) fresh so you don’t have any badware on the machine.
You can just hit the Windows key to bring up the start menu, then type “About PC” and that will have all the usual hardware info you need.
Shoutout pcpartpicker.
jfc I just went on there to build the same machine I have sitting on my desk from a year and a half or so ago and it would be $5.5k if I built it again today
Talk about timing the market…
I’ve seen some pretty good deals on prebuilts at everywhere but best buy lmao. Reinstalling windows won’t be a problem for me since I use linux!
If I may ask what’s wrong with water-cooling? Should I avoid it or is it personal preference?
For 75% of gaming builds water cooling doesn’t really matter. Air cooling is good enough these days that unless you’re overclocking there isn’t really a point. It is, however, much quieter if you do a custom loop, but that can easily add an extra $500 - $1000 to your build cost, especially if you don’t have the proper tools already. Stick with air cooling.
Water cooling is just air cooling with extra steps.
It’s definitely a personal preference, but it’s a very… strong personal preference and in many cases that’s for good reason, in both directions. Water cooling performance is typically incredible and if you are overclocking or otherwise generating a lot of heat in a small space or pursuing very high performance, it not only can manage that effectively but it can do it while being quiet, properly designed it can be pretty close to silent, that’s real nice. The downside is that it’s expensive and it’s… water. It’s not necessarily maintenance-free, unless you’re using an all-in-one (AIO) but that comes with its own limitations, but the biggest problem in my opinion is that when (not if) it fails, it has a high chance of being a computer-ending event. When an air-cooler fails your PC will start throttling, might shut down, in a rare case something might be damaged from overheating, but 99% of the time you just replace a fan, blow out some fins, and it’s happy as can be again after that little hiccup. When a water-cooler fails… it’s typically a big mess. Both practically and financially.
With water cooling, I think it’s fair to say they are either people who have regretted water cooling a PC at least once, or they are people who haven’t regretted water cooling a PC yet. Few people can ever say they’ve regretted using air-cooling in a PC, and I suspect anyone who would say they regret air-cooling a PC, probably also falls into the category of someone who hasn’t regretted water cooling a PC yet.
Oh dear. Totally not going water cooling I guess
I have water cooling in my PC, which I have had to replace as the one that originally came with it from the shop failed after about a year and a half.
The failure was not catastrophic however. The failure was in the sealing of the cooler, so when it got hot enough the water eventually evaporated out of it.
I haven’t had an issue with my new cooler since.
There’s nothing generally wrong with water cooling depending on your skill and commitment to the building process. There’s 2 ways to go with water cooling: an AIO (all in one) cooler, like this, or a custom loop, like this. The AIO you just follow the instruction manual and you’re set, a custom loop you have to buy all the parts, all the tubing, all the fittings, and assemble it all yourself. You have to really know what you’re doing.
My personal preference, however, is also to stick with air cooling. When an AIO breaks, the entire unit has to be replaced. When a tower air cooler breaks, its just the fan, which you can swap out more cheaply and easily.
OP if you live near a Microcenter, go check them out! They don’t do delivery orders, but they are a goldmine of hardware and enthusiast knowledge, and their prices are usually pretty reasonable********.
Oh, yeah I’ll probably roll with air cooling then. I don’t wanna do all that.
Lowkey don’t know if there’s even a microcenter here but I’ll check them out if I can manage it :)
Water-cooling is more expensive and needs to be replaced periodically, where air coolers cost way less and basically just last forever because they have no moving parts. I don’t think anyone should buy them but obviously that’s something of a hot take.