The early 2020s were grim times for PC builders, but the stars and parts are aligning to bring DIY desktops back into favor. Our expert makes the case for busting out your screwdriver.
For a time in the depths of the pandemic, plenty of industry watchers—not to mention, countless internet commenters—railed that PC building, as a practical pursuit, was dead, done, gone-zo.
Of course, graphics cards were made of unobtanium during those fraught years. Who can forget? Some of the other anti-building arguments extended further back, though.
“Overclocking is dying!” was a big one. Fair enough; with CPU and GPU yields so optimized, and parts so effectively binned (micro-classified, per sample, for maximum performance), PC tweakers’ efforts and elaborate cooling hardware are barely worth the trouble anymore. “Gen-over-gen CPU speed increases aren’t worth it!” Hard to argue with that, too, if you look at processor releases over span of a year or two. “You and I can’t compete with a Dell or a Lenovo on what PC components cost them!” True enough…especially in the years under lockdown.
It's time to start doing this again. (Credit: Molly Flores)
The pandemic, with pervasive PC-component shortages and GPU price hyperinflation, cemented that perception of PC building as no longer worth it. Plenty of us were stuck indoors with time on our hands, staring at the four walls—never a better time to build a custom computer! But, frustration: The price of graphics cards busted through the roof and kept on going, and that was when you could find the latest cards at all. GPU affordability was already being crushed by supply shortages and price-gouging stemming from the crypto-mining blitzes of 2017 to 2019, powered by huge demand for mining rigs. In the US, certain other components weren't immune to tariffs and supply-chain disruptions. Building your own modest PC made less and less economic sense.
So, here we are in 2024. Not all of those stresses have abated—not by a long shot. Still, we'd argue that building your own PC is in a better place than it's been for half a decade or more. Some of the reasons are new trends; others are classic arguments. Let’s run down the new and the old.
The GPU World Is Back to (a Sense of) Normalcy
(Hurrah! MSRPs actually mean something again.)
For many PC builders, the GPU was and remains the single biggest component investment, with the possible exception of the CPU. You can buy the GPU you want today, for the most part, at or around MSRP (aka, "list price"). But 2017 to 2022 left scars for some shoppers. Price inflation was the norm. (Remember the GPU retailer lotteries?) The result was a sort of mental “price reset” that we live with to this day. Especially because high-end cards can cost as much as double what they did a decade ago.
Look deeper than that simple math, though. When the GeForce GTX 1080 launched in 2016, it was the top-end GeForce card for consumers, at $699. Subsequent generational GPU launches saw that same relative “tier” of card tick higher and higher, with the late-2022 launch price of the GeForce RTX 4080, for example, at an eye-popping $1,199 MSRP. (Not to mention, the time between the 1080 and the 4080 was warped by massive pandemic price distortion, in which MSRP meant very little.)
That said, 2016’s high-end card was a master for gaming at 1080p, solid for gaming at 1440p, but barely good enough (generally well under 60fps in our tests) for any kind of 4K play. The idea of 4K gaming was just a flicker in most gamers’ eyes; consumer 4K monitors were still impractical for most folks. Today, the RTX 4080 and RTX 4080 Super (the real 4K gaming contenders, admittedly priced for extraordinary budgets) are in a whole other league, and games have gotten much more demanding. But current $500-to-$700 cards (like the GeForce RTX 4070 Super and AMD's Radeon RX 7800 XT) serve up super-smooth, high-refresh 1440p gaming and moderate 4K play. That’s an impressive performance ramp-up for the money over time. (Remember! A GPU has to push four times as many pixels in 4K as at 1080p. That's no small jump, and midrange cards have nearly made it.)
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super: 4K card deluxe (Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)
Indeed, that is what makes the GPU calculus all so confusing: You get so much more now from the lesser tiers of card. The cards with parallel names, from generation to generation, have shot up in relative price of late. (The launch MSRPs of the GTX 1080, RTX 2080, RTX 3080, and RTX 4080 Founders Edition were $699, $799, $699, and $1,199, though the pandemic made the middle two MSRPs a total joke.) But today's midrange cards are now more than enough for casual and even many serious gamers. And where you once needed a $699 GeForce GTX 1080 to play then-cutting-edge games at high frame rates at the highest settings at 1440p, now you can do it with a card that costs less, and with much-more-demanding games to boot. Plus, you have supersampling and frame-generation techniques (the many flavors of AMD's FSR and Nvidia's DLSS) that let you stretch the abilities of your modern card even further.
In short: There’s far more now to gauging graphics cards than just comparing names and their relative positions in the line. The family structures and names have stayed the same, but the family members have gained lots more muscle top to bottom, redefining what most people really need as a baseline. (Which, in truth? An under-$300 1080p GPU will do for most casual gamers.)
Plus, to get a fair deal on a current-gen graphics card, it's no longer necessary to buy a full pre-built PC from an OEM like Lenovo or a Dell, to leverage their buying power as huge companies. You almost had to do that from 2020 to 2022, when GPUs were in such short supply. Today, most new AMD and Nvidia GPUs are easy to get at close to MSRP.
ASRock's version of the Intel Arc A580 GPU: Welcome low-end graphics competition (Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)
A final factor: Intel's 2023 entry into the graphics-card market, with its Arc line of video cards, has bulked up the mostly somnolent low end. Intel spent most of 2023 honing its discrete-GPU drivers and gritting out its growing pains in a hyper-competitive GPU market. Now, 2024 sees its low-end offerings competitive, and we're excited to see what 2024’s expected second-gen Intel “Battlemage” cards will bring, with stronger drivers out of the gate. (See our roundup of the best graphics cards.)
Rockin' Sockets: AMD AM5 Exists, AM4 Is Hanging On
(Even Intel LGA 1700 is showing staying power...)
AMD upended the desktop PC world in 2017 with the release of its first Ryzen desktop chips. They debuted on the AM4 platform, whose socket and related chipsets endured until 2023. And, impressively, AM4 is still viable in 2024. (AMD even released a few more probably last-hurrah budget AM4 chips at CES 2024.) Now, you can’t upgrade every old Ryzen AM4 board to a recent AM4 chip (you need to look for available BIOS updates), but that's amazing longevity from one platform.
An AMD AM5 X670 motherboard from Aorus (Credit: Joe Shields)
Plus, AMD has promised CPU support for AM5 through at least 2026, so you may enjoy a similar enduring upgrade path if you build a AM5 system now. Conversely, you can get great deals on robust AM4-socket Ryzen chips to drop in an older board you already own, and see great gains without buying a new motherboard at all.
Intel, in contrast, has kept changing sockets and platforms every second generation (well, barring the marginally advanced 14th Gen Raptor Lake Refresh, which clings to the same LGA 1700 socket as 12th and 13th Gen Core for a third go-around). That means that, most of the time, if you build an Intel-based desktop, your next big upgrade will mandate swapping out the motherboard and CPU.
Intel Core i5-14600K: A third go-around for LGA 1700 sockets (Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)
Still, if you haven't upgraded your desktop in the last few years, Intel has made it mighty enticing to do it now. With Intel’s addition of its hybrid architecture of Performance and Efficient cores with 12th Gen Core (“Alder Lake”), and its excellent performance with a single core or a small subset of cores, you're looking at chips that vie for the top of the field for gaming, especially at 1080p for high-speed, high-refresh-rate play. If you’re at a 10th Gen or earlier Intel chip, 2024's landscape looks good for an upgrade, though you'll probably have to upgrade your RAM (from DDR4 to DDR5) along with your motherboard. (See our roundup of the best CPUs.)
SSDs Gone Turbo: PCI Express 5.0 Storage Is Now a Thing
(You probably don't need it, but it's scary fast.)
To be sure, the PCI Express 5.0 (PCIe 5.0) bus won't matter much for GPU hounds looking to maximize graphics performance. But for content creators who need to do massive, super-fast file transfers, PCIe 5.0 solid-state drives (SSDs) have emerged as consumer (mind you, elite consumer) items from 2023 into 2024. Support for them is spotty, except on the latest, best-equipped motherboards, but speeds of 10,000Mbps and faster will entice power users working with very large data sets or sizable media files in content-creation fields, especially video editing.
Crucial's T705: Super-speedster PCIe 5.0 M.2 SSD (Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
The ability to add multiple PCIe 5.0 drives to a system, even if you have to do it via a PCIe SSD expansion card like the Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 in a full-size motherboard slot, also creates intriguing possibilities for the fast backup of enormous media files for creative-field workflows. You won't find native PCIe 5.0 M.2 support on more than one M.2 slot on most motherboards (for now, you get just one, if any at all), but this is a burgeoning area that makes 2024 right for a PC build emphasizing extreme high-speed storage, if you need it. (See our roundup of the best M.2 SSDs, which factors in the top PCIe 5.0 models we’ve tested.)
Recent Creature Comforts Are Making PC Building Easier
(Farewell, M.2 screws! We won't miss you.)
Yes, we are still frustrated by front-panel header cables that require you to pore over your motherboard manual for pin layouts before plugging them in. And, if you don’t have eagle vision, you still may need a loupe magnifier to identify all of the pins and connectors on your typical motherboard. Some things never change.
But convenience features like flip locks on M.2 SSD slots (replacing the irksome, easy-to-lose M.2 micro-screws) are spreading. The standardized header connector for front-panel USB Type-C ports (dubbed “Type-E”) has taken hold. And M.2 slots have spread to most all motherboards. Plus, many board-makers now adhere to a standard layout of pins for the front-panel switch/LED cable headers. All these items combined make the build experience a lot different than it was five or 10 years ago. If you've held off upgrading your desktop that long, you are in for a pleasant surprise.
A USB 3.2 header ("Type-E") cable for a front-panel USB Type-C port (Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
The emergence of addressable RGB (ARGB) ports on motherboards, too, has made case and component lighting less of a rat's nest of proprietary connections and controllers, depending on the hardware you bought. Chaining a few fans to an ARGB port on the motherboard, or to one connection on a controller, reduces lighting-cable spaghetti. And Windows 11’s emerging embrace of Windows Dynamic Lighting has the promise to eventually simplify lighting control over PC desktop components, as well, by reducing some of the jumble of utilities clashing for RGB control. That’s still in its infancy (selected keyboards and mice, so far, support the Microsoft standard), but compatibility with PC chassis and more is on the docket.
RAM and Storage Are Cheap, So Build While You Can
(The good times probably won't last.)
Aggressive prices on SSDs and DDR5 memory (the latter now the RAM type of choice on current AMD and Intel platforms) may not last the year. It's a golden era of high-capacity, low-cost drives. RAM, too: Considering that at this writing you could snag 32GB of system main memory for under $100, seize the day, and your credit card. Bringing over parts from your existing PC to a new motherboard? It won’t include compatible DDR5 memory, unless you built the old PC in the last year or so, so make a move now if you need DDR5. The investment you make in moderate-priced DDR5 now should last you into the next upgrade, at a minimum.
And you haven't gotten on the PCI Express SSD train yet, and are still using a SATA SSD (or, heaven forbid, a platter hard drive as your boot drive), all aboard. Prices for PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs make the drives affordable to most PC builders, and the drives are fast enough for almost every use case. PCIe 4.0 500GB drives (the smallest we’d bother with these days) start at around $45 to $50.
SK Hynix Platinum P41: A great PCIe 4.0 M.2 speedster (Credit: Molly Flores)
If you won’t be doing large sustained data transfers, and your write needs are light, you can scout bargains among the hordes of cheap DRAM-less M.2 SSDs, which rely on your PC’s own memory for some caching duties. Sure, they’ll tank hard, speed-wise, on huge multi-gigabyte file transfers, but they still run rings around platter hard drives for everyday use. (See our roundup of the best overall internal SSDs.)
It's an Absolute Golden Age of PC Cases
(Your chassis needs wood inlays and an LCD screen...right?)
If you're of a certain age, you remember the early armies of blah-beige PC cases. As PC building developed into a bona fide pursuit, PC cases evolved. We saw the the home-theater-PC phase (remember PC cases shaped like stereo components?), the emergence of compact Mini-ITX cases, the super-towers designed to host banks of hard drives, then into the sci-fi-inspired space age of Alienware-chassis imitators. All the while, RGB lighting was infiltrating desktop chassis (especially once side-panel windows took off), first as mood-lighting strips and one-color fans, up to today’s programmable RGB fans, and the RGB trim highlights on GPUs, cases, motherboards, and RAM modules alike.
Yeah, that's wood: Fractal Design's popular North PC case (Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)
Here in 2024, we're now deep into the “glass showcase” phase of PC-case design. It's popular to build a PC with relative ease into a max-visibility parts aquarium. Of course, all the other desktop-case styles continue to co-exist to a greater or lesser degree, making for a wild, wonderfully diverse world of cases for every taste, color scheme, and amount of desk space. As PC-case makers engage in glorious one-upsmanship, shoppers and builders win. You've now got PC cases with built-in LCD screens, PC cases with cool flat-pack modular designs, cases with wooden faces, even modular models that let you bolt on additional sections when your space needs grow.
Hyte Y70 Touch: An LCD screen in your PC case...just because! (Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)
And the innovation is showing no sign of slowing down. Follow a trade show like CES or Computex (see our PC case reports from the last editions at the links), and you can see the full slate of what's on the market. Or browse your local PC-parts emporium (if you have one), noodle around Newegg, or check out the latest reviews and YouTube videos to see just how diverse and creative the PC-chassis field has gotten over the past five to 10 years. Your PC build should be boring only if you really, really want it to be.
In Win's ModFree Deluxe PC case: Add modules as you need 'em (Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)
As mentioned, tempered glass is definitely ascendant, with the occasional foray into new materials like wood and even cloth. Another trend: Many Mini-ITX cases—the smallest chassis, which accept compact Mini-ITX motherboards—are nowadays not as “mini” as they used to be, making accommodations for foot-long video cards, caving in to the modern trend of giant GPUs. (See our roundups of the best overall PC cases, the best tower cases, and the best Mini-ITX cases.)
Our test build with MSI's first-gen Project Zero case and motherboard (Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Another likely Next Big Thing is the increasing popularity of the “reverse motherboard.” This idea originated with boutique PC maker Maingear but has been pioneered for PC builders in aftermarket gear by the likes of MSI and Asus. Look out in 2024 for their initiatives called, respectively, Project Zero and Back to the Future (BTF). Both allow for the easy construction of showcase PCs with few or no visible interior cables. How? All the cable connections to the motherboard are made on the back side of the board, hidden from view. (For much more on the topic, see our test build from earlier this year with MSI's Project Zero gear.)
It's High Time for High-Refresh Monitors
(For gamers, big, fast panels are cheap now.)
The last time you built a PC, 360Hz or 500Hz monitors probably didn't exist. Of course, only a few highly motivated esports players really need those. But we’ll also bet you couldn't get a more modest 144Hz gaming monitor at a bargain price then, either. Now, they’re easy to buy for less than $300, and good ones, too. (See our roundup of the best cheap gaming monitors.)
How does that tie into building a new PC? Attaining the high in-game refresh rates required to leverage these panels at 1080p or 1440p requires a carefully chosen combination of CPU and GPU to avoid frame-rate bottlenecks. And that's best achieved in a precise custom-built DIY configuration.
AMD and Intel alike offer compelling CPU offerings to keep those floodgates of frames open. For AMD, that would be its special Ryzen 5000-series and 7000-series X3D processors, packed with extra on-die cache. For Intel, its late-model (12th to 14th Gen) Core i7 and i9 CPUs deliver excellent gaming performance, thanks to high-speed operation on a small subset of their cores. (See our roundup of the best CPUs for gaming.)
If you haven't joined the high-refresh-rate gaming revolution yet, a 2024 build can put you right in the thick of it with a proper late-generation CPU and GPU combo. A current midrange or better CPU will put you in a great position for high-refresh play, and you’ll never look back at playing at 60Hz/1080p with fondness again. (See our roundup of the best graphics cards for 1080p gaming, and concentrate on the models recommended for high-refresh PC gaming.)
Cooling and Lighting Gear Is Easier to Install Than Ever
(Slashing and simplying cables is 100% win.)
When you're building a big tower desktop, one of the most cumbersome tasks is routing and planning the tangle of cabling for case fans. With some jumbo chassis hosting as many as 10 fans, and with modern fan designs requiring two or three cables per fan (one for fan control, one for lighting, and sometimes a lighting pass-through, too), things can get super messy, super fast.
To that end, makers of desktop cooling hardware have evolved their gear in a host of ways. More than one fan manufacturer now offers snap-edge fans, which let you connect case fans in a series and wire just the last fan to a controller or motherboard, instead of wiring each one separately.
Corsair iCue Link kit: Easy links between fans and coolers (Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
In the same vein, PC DIY powerhouse Corsair has introduced its highly innovative (if pricey) iCue Link ecosystem, which incorporates all-in-one liquid coolers, case fans, pumps, and more. It lets you connect compliant Corsair components in simple series, using edge connectors and short, unobtrusive cables. It reduces cable clutter and increases neatness by leaps and bounds. (See our sample build with Corsair iCue Link.)
A Corsair iCue Link build: Where are all the wires? (Credit: John Burek)
In the same vein, the big players in the PC-cooling market have been evolving whole mix-and-match ecosystems of cooling parts that make assembling truly custom cooling loops easy. Cooler Master has shown off, since Computex 2023, a nifty family of tubing, connectors, elbows, and other fittings under the brand name MasterLoop. Likewise, competitor Thermaltake has offered similar families of fittings for some time, as has Corsair. Rather than cobbling elbows, hoses, hard tubing, pumps, reservoirs, bending tools, and other cooling gear from a variety of sources, you can get all of your parts from one supplier and know they work well together. (They even offer the coolant.)
Cooler Master MasterLoop liquid cooling fittings (Credit: John Burek)
In 2024, Eye-Popping Customs Are Easy Upgrades
(Putting LCDs on every doggone thing is the new RGB.)
Until the demise of the optical drive and the 5.25-inch drive bay, the 2000s were a classic age of outrageous PC-case “bay devices.” You could stick status screens, cigarette lighters, cup holders, little storage drawers, and other useful and wacky accessories into your PC tower's drive bays. These prepackaged mods were easy to buy online, and installing them in your case could be equal parts ingenious and kitsch.
Alas, drive-bay devices are history, now that most new PC cases lack front-accessible bays. But new generations of boxed bling are ever-evolving, and the new stuff is a far cry from a cigarette lighter. Take PC-case screens: A few of ASRock’s LiveMixer PC motherboards employ a special eDP (external DisplayPort) connector for incorporating LCD panels into your desktop case. In the same vein, Hyte’s wildly popular Y70 Touch PC case does the work for you, incorporating a tall, thin screen into an angular slice of the front panel. Lian Li one-ups that, with its series of Unifan PC case fans that have programmable LCD screens in the hub. (Yes, really.) And CPU coolers with LCD screens atop the CPU heat sink are the new cooling hotness, with Hyte's THICC Q60 taking the crown for most audacious screen (so far).
Hyte THICC Q60: Yes, that's a customizable display on top of your CPU (Credit: John Burek)
We already talked about reverse motherboards and the efforts to eliminate visible cables, if you want to do that. Conversely, if your cables have to show, why not dress them up? Rainbow RGB power cables have been thing for some years now, pioneered by Lian Li's Strimer series. Now, you can get light-up rainbow cables for your GPU-power, CPU-power, and PSU 24-pin main cables. A colorful RGB riot is as easy as buying a couple of kits for a few Jacksons.
Finally, as Ever: You Avoid Proprietary Designs
(A non-standard power supply or motherboard? Never!)
One of the best aspects of building your own PC may not become evident until years later, when you need to upgrade a part or swap out one that's malfunctioning. With some major makers’ pre-built desktops, you may be in for rude surprises around what you can replace with an aftermarket part, and what's a special order from the OEM’s support site.
Take, for example, the PC power supply. If you build your own PC, in 99 out of 100 builds, you'll install an industry-standard power supply into a PC case, using either the overwhelmingly common ATX PS/2 form factor, or the niche SFX or SFX-L standard for compact power supplies and cases. And if you buy a boutique desktop, it'll probably use one of these two types, and that's fine. But pre-built desktops from the likes of Dell and HP are notorious for, at times, employing proprietary power supplies that limit you to sourcing replacements or upgrades solely from them. In the most extreme cases, the proprietary supply may also use a non-standard connector to the motherboard, which limits your upgrade options even further. That may come into play not only if the power supply goes bad, but if it's of a wattage too low to accommodate, say, a more powerful graphics card and you want to upgrade. You may be stuck with what the OEM can offer.
Inside an Alienware Aurora: Proprietary motherboard and PSU (Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Motherboards are not immune, either. The standard motherboard form factors are ATX, MicroATX, and Mini-ITX. Some makers of pre-built PCs will adhere to these, employing retail equivalent boards from one of the four major makers (Asus, MSI, Gigabyte, or ASRock). But plenty of mass-market pre-build desktops use custom motherboard designs that may not adhere to one of the standard form factors. Swapping out one of these boards later on may present fitment problems, or worse. Take, for example, the recent Alienware Aurora R16, an attractive gaming desktop that, alas, employs a custom-design motherboard with the actual front-panel connectors incorporated straight into the motherboard and aligned with holes on the case. No standard aftermarket motherboard will work in that chassis elegantly.
When you build your own PC, you choose a case and motherboard form factor that match, as well as a power supply that complements the case. And if you need to change out either one later on, you'll have an upgrade path of parts that use a standard design to fit. You'll also have a far greater assortment of parts to choose from. You’re building—and buying into—a PC with a future.
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