The three-pronged way forward for customized PC constructing — from repurposing forgotten elements to ultra-premium works of gaming artwork

With RAMageddon, the storage apocalypse, GPU stagnation, and GPU value will increase all occurring roughly concurrently, that is the worst time to construct a PC that I can bear in mind — and I constructed my first PC within the earlier century (powered by an AMD K6-2). If you may have a rig that meets your wants for the time being (even when simply barely), present costs most likely make you extra curious about protecting it working than in contemplating main upgrades or, much more daunting, beginning over from scratch with a brand new construct.

But fret as we’d about the way forward for our much-beloved component-swapping pastime, a number of articles and experiences in latest weeks have given me glimpses of the PC-building future, and I don’t assume it’s all dangerous — at the very least as long as you may have time to analysis and tinker, you possibly can reside with out the highest-end parts, or you may have sufficient of a construct funds that value doesn’t matter a lot.

Old elements get a brand new life, with some affected person tweaking

First off, we just lately tested AMD’s BC-250, a 2021-era APU that started off as defective or cut-down PS5 silicon, repurposed as a cryptomining card. But more recently, a community-developed BIOS and drivers have turned this custom hardware into a Linux-based competitor to Valve’s much-hyped Steam Machine, while costing roughly half the price of a similarly configured system, once you source the power supply and other necessary parts. It even comes with 16GB of shared GDDR6, sidestepping the current RAM pricing issue altogether.

Now, this is more of a project than a PC. You have to source the card (from places like AliExpress, eBay, or Etsy), then research and figure out how to flash the board so that it will even boot, followed by getting Linux and the requisite drivers installed, before you can even think about playing games. But depending on your sample, you might also be able to unlock extra CPU cores and compute units for even better performance.

It’s far from a simple setup. But this kind of community-led hardware repurposing and enhancement reminds me of two distinct hardware eras: The very early days of PC kits (which I wasn’t really around for), and the early 2000s, when you could unlock AMD Athlon and Duron multipliers with a pencil (or later, conductive silver lacquer). Unlocking higher clocks and extra performance without paying for a much pricier chip is exactly the kind of achievable dream that the PC enthusiast hobby was founded on, and it’s good to see it making a comeback – even if it’s with this one very specific piece of hardware.

But as AI hardware development continues — and especially if (or when) specific areas of the hardware bubble pop or deflate – I expect to see more situations where communities of tinkerers figure out how to get discarded hardware to run games and other compute tasks, giving budget buyers hope for acceptable performance at reasonable prices. Ironically, AI tools like Claude Code will almost certainly make breakthroughs in hardware repurposing much easier.

To boldly go (to price brackets) where no PC has gone before

On the other end of the PC price spectrum, I recently assembled a PC using parts from Asus’ ROG Edition 20 line. The anniversary hardware, which debuted earlier this year at Computex, ignores affordability concerns entirely. Asus instead opted to celebrate two decades of its Republic of Gamers sub-brand by taking several of its already expensive parts and peripherals, adding a few (mostly aesthetic) features and some gold accents, and charging even more for them.

How much more? The finished PC, with about $2,000 worth of peripherals, a $3,300 motherboard and cooler combo, and a $6,000 RTX 5090, prices roughly $15,000 – and that’s with a modest 2TB SSD and 32GB of RAM. If you go for a extra becoming 128GB package with tight timings and 8TB of solid-state storage, you may simply spend $20,000 on a construct like this.

As robust as it’s for many people to swallow, there’s doubtless a big sufficient buyer base of players and PC fans who can and pays no matter it takes to personal high-end, high-performance PCs to maintain choices like this afloat. Because whereas the price of particular person elements has definitely elevated, the luxurious PC market has existed for many years. I do know as a result of within the years earlier than I joined Tom’s Hardware, I reviewed a number of PCs with customized cooling loops and a number of graphics playing cards (as much as quad-SLI) from the likes of Digital Storm and Maingear. That market isn’t going away; it’s simply getting costlier.

The murky way forward for mainstream desktop gaming PCs

So what concerning the mainstream PC gaming market? Things are more durable there, and I believe that area will proceed to shrink because of, nicely, all the pieces I linked to up high. Those searching for gaming choices within the sub-$2,000 vary that “just work” with out a lot tinkering usually tend to make do with consoles (that are, in fact, additionally getting costlier), gaming laptops or handhelds, or console-like PCs like Valve’s Steam Machine.

Intel and AMD are reviving or extending the lifespan of chips and platforms that support last-gen DDR4, but older memory isn’t getting any cheaper either. And our own testing has shown that DDR4 is increasingly holding back gaming performance.

There was a brief hope that Chinese memory makers like CXMT might help bring down DDR5 prices. But U.S. approval for that seems unlikely, especially as the FCC is busy banning humanoid robots and robot vacuum cleaners built overseas. And, of course, companies like CXMT aren’t looking to be PC saviors. They want to sell their RAM to AI hyperscalers for the same high prices as SK hynix, Micron, and Samsung. And even if DDR5 somehow suddenly became more affordable, GPU prices are also continuing to climb, and storage (SSDs and hard drives) faces similar pricing issues.

Can software save the day?

Like it or not, we’ll certainly see further advancements in AI upscaling and other VRAM tweaks and tricks that make modern gaming possible on older and current-gen cards with 8GB or even 4GB of VRAM before the price of RAM, storage, and GPUs drop significantly.

Will it be enough to keep PC gaming enticing and affordable enough to prop up the mainstream PC gaming market? That’s tough to say with any certainty at this point, but if being a PC enthusiast since the 1990s (and a PC gamer since the late 1980s) has taught me one thing, it’s that this hobby is resilient. Some will pay what they need to pay for high-end hardware. Some will find suitable solutions by tinkering with repurposed silicon. And others will forge a middle ground that works for them.

I transitioned from a PC enthusiast to a full-time professional covering the PC and related hardware space in 2008. Even back then, people were telling me that the desktop was dead or dying. Instead, it has evolved and survived for nearly 20 years, through the smartphone revolution, past soldered-on laptop components, through two cycles of Steam Machines, and the death of physical game media. Meanwhile, game stores like Steam rake in record profits, indicating that the demand for PC gaming remains high. All this tells me that PC building and PC gaming will need to continue to evolve, but it’s not quite on the endangered hardware list yet.