Does It FINALLY Make Sense To Build A Gaming PC?

Last Updated on October 10, 2022

Two years…

Two years is about how long it has been since the PC hardware market went complete bonkers where there was hardly any hardware that was fairly priced for builders.

From the crypto mining craze to the pandemic affecting chip manufacturers and everything else in between… It all started about two years ago.

So now begs the question…

Is it finally a good time to build a gaming PC? Does it make sense now?

Is the graphics card market back to normal?

Are manufacturers able to keep up with the high demand?

In this post, I’d like to discuss the topic overall, to get into whether or not it makes sense to do a gaming PC build of your own now, and what the near future of hardware has in store for those of us that want to get a new build going.

Are GPU Prices Back To “Normal”?

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And by normal, I’m talking about the listed manufacturer’s suggested retail price. Prices had stayed far above the MSRP, especially with GPUs, for too long of a time due to shortages, the pandemic, scalpers, and crypto mining farms.

However, within the past few months, we’ve finally been seeing the downward trend of pricing go down and continue to go down – but, in general, prices are still higher than what they should be.

High-end cards have been getting close to hitting the mark on MSRP prices. Other cards such as the 3060, 3060 Ti, and 3070 are still floating around higher price ranges, but they’ve continued to decline in price.

With Nvidia releasing the new RTX 4000 series cards soon, I’m certain that we’ll see these prices go down even more and more… And it’s about time that we can finally see this happening!

It used to be that we’d be worried about the “perfect” time to build a PC because of new hardware on the horizon…

But nowadays we’re more worried about when crypto prices are going to go up and miners snag up all of the GPUs again or if manufacturers have problems with their facilities rather than timing a build based on new hardware releases…

It’s a beautiful thing to see that pricing has gone down. For a couple of years now it has made a lot more sense to buy a pre-built gaming PC rather than building your own because pre-built PC companies have had the capital to have a larger inventory of hardware.

Now that the market is coming back in favor of building, we are now seeing the price difference between building VS buying pre-built get bigger and bigger.

What About All Other Hardware?

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GPUs were, without a doubt, the main reason why building a PC didn’t make sense throughout these past couple of years – for the reasons I’ve already said (mining, pandemic, etc).

Chip manufacturers did take a huge hit during the pandemic which resulted in RAM, CPUs, and motherboards… Almost every other piece of hardware involved with a PC build going up in price.

You even saw it with people trying to buy new vehicles and phones… Chip manufacturing is crucial for anything that uses any sort of technology involved.

Nowadays, we’re seeing some of the lowest prices ever for NVMe M.2 solid state drives, RAM, and even power supplies. Motherboards could be a bit cheaper, but they’ve gone down enough in price for it to at least make sense to buy.

All other hardware has followed suit due to chip manufacturing coming back in full swing and the hardware market as a whole coming back.

Is It A Good Time To Build A Gaming PC?

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I wouldn’t say that today it’s the absolute best time ever to build a gaming PC… Pricing is still quite a bit higher overall, especially with GPUs, to be able to say that now is the best time.

With that said… Right now is the greatest time we’ve seen in the past couple of years to build one.

With how crazy things can get, and how unpredictable the crypto mining market can be, it’s hard telling how long this downward pricing trend will continue. It’d be amazing to see prices be listed right at MSRP or even just slightly higher than it, but I don’t think we’ll be seeing that for a long while, if ever.

But, with everything considered, I do think that it’s a decent time to be building a PC.

And I’m EXCITED about it! I purposely haven’t updated the build guide pages here throughout all of the crazy price changes because it was difficult to keep up with all of the changes… I couldn’t do updates every single day as it does take a considerable amount of time to set up each guide.

But I think it’s a good time where, hopefully, pricing will stay more “level” for at least the rest of this year… So I’ll be getting to work on those guide updates as soon as I can!

What Does The Future of PC Hardware Look Like?

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I could go into a separate post about the future of PC hardware… Because it’s going to be a wild world of changes – even within the next couple of years we’ll be seeing massive changes in the industry.

It’ll be interesting to see how well (or not well) the RTX 4000 series cards do with Nvidia. If you haven’t seen the first edition yet, you need to check it out. It has to be the absolute largest video card to date.

I’m not sure how many folks out there will be able to fit the card into their builds… Or how it’ll manage to stay straight in the PCI-E slot…

Hopefully, that doesn’t mean that GPUs are just going to continue getting larger and larger to the point where we need to buy, or pay extra, for GPUs to be properly fitted into the PCI-E slots without the weight being too much…

New releases = better pricing for previous generations of hardware. And straight up, I still rock my GTX 1070 in my build and it’s still killing it with any newer games! Sure, I’m not getting 144 FPS at max settings, but I really don’t mind that. I’ll likely go with an AMD upgrade whenever I think it’s time to replace the 1070.

What do you think about the new 4000 series coming out? Do you think Nvidia will do well with the new cards?

Are you looking into building your own PC now that pricing has gone lower?

Let me know in the comments below! 😀