Some girls get excited about buying a new pair of shoes. Me? I’ve always been the kind of girl who gets excited about building a new PC.
I appreciate a beautiful pair of shoes, of course, but the prospect of a new processor or graphics card has always stirred a particular kind of excitement in me. There’s something wonderfully satisfying about discovering what’s available, comparing the possibilities and imagining the computer you could put together if only your budget were a little more cooperative. Other people might spend an afternoon browsing the shops. I’d happily spend mine researching hardware, surrounded by computer magazines and convinced that the next component I discovered would be the one that changed everything.
Besides, a good pair of shoes can take you somewhere interesting. A gaming PC can take you into an entirely different world, and preferably one in which you don’t have to worry about whether your heels are comfortable.
My fascination began when I was twenty, newly employed and enjoying that wonderful feeling of finally earning my own money. Financial independence was an exciting concept, although I hadn’t yet fully appreciated the rather inconvenient detail that independence also meant paying for things myself. Naturally, one of my first important decisions was to buy a computer I couldn’t actually afford.
I wanted to explore the beautiful worlds I’d read about, lose myself in RPGs and MMORPGs, and have a machine capable of keeping up with my imagination. Food, I reasoned, was an area in which I might make a few economies. Perhaps I’d even end up with a better figure. Decisions, decisions.
My bank account was less enthusiastic. I ended up using my overdraft, paying additional charges every month for what might have been a year, possibly two. It was an expensive introduction to adulthood, and one that made me very determined to get my money’s worth. If I was going to pay that much for a computer, it had better be a good one, and it had better last.
Fortunately, I bought it from a genuine PC enthusiast, someone who understood hardware and enjoyed explaining why one component might be a better choice than another. I learned that a carefully selected collection of parts could often give you a considerably better machine than a similarly priced computer sitting on a shop shelf. You could put the money where it mattered, avoid paying extra for features you didn’t need and end up with something built specifically for the games you wanted to play.
It was a revelation. Buying a computer was no longer simply about choosing which finished machine looked most impressive. It became a little puzzle, and I discovered I rather enjoyed solving it.
The Days of Magazines, Forums and Questionable Financial Decisions
Researching hardware was a different experience back then. The internet existed, but it wasn’t the enormous library of instant answers we have today. There were computer magazines, those wonderfully detailed publications filled with benchmarks, specifications and photographs of components that could make you reconsider your entire financial situation. I’d study the reviews, compare processors and graphics cards, and imagine what I might build if I saved just a little more money. Let’s do a shout out to PC Magazine and Build PC.
And then there were the forums, where you discovered that a graphics card could look magnificent in a magazine and still behave rather badly in the game you actually wanted to play. A Radeon might offer excellent performance on paper, only for someone to describe a particularly irritating driver problem in your favourite game. NVIDIA had its own share of difficulties, naturally. The challenge was working out whether you were reading about a genuine problem, a rare exception or someone who had developed a personal grievance against an entire corporation.
I loved that part of the research. You learned to look beyond the impressive numbers and ask better questions. What did people actually experience? Which problems had been fixed? Was a more expensive component genuinely better, or simply more fashionable? Sometimes the most useful information came from someone who’d been using the hardware for months rather than someone who’d tested it for an afternoon.
It was also where I discovered just how passionately people could defend their favourite manufacturers. Two decades later, we have more sophisticated benchmarks, faster internet and artificial intelligence to help us compare everything, yet people still argue about AMD and NVIDIA as though their family honour depends on it. Progress is a fascinating thing.
Every three or four years, the excitement of planning another build would return. I enjoyed discovering what had changed, what was worth upgrading and how much more I could get for the money. The computer itself was wonderful, but the process of choosing it was part of the pleasure. Apparently, I’d developed a taste for long-term investments, provided they came with a three-to-four-year renewal option.
Not every technological romance was successful, however. At one point, I convinced myself that an Alienware 17 gaming laptop would give me the best of both worlds: a powerful gaming machine with the freedom to use it wherever I pleased. Perhaps I’d watched too much The Big Bang Theory, because I’d imagined something effortlessly convenient, almost glamorous.
What I got was an enormous piece of equipment that was technically portable in much the same way that a small piece of furniture is portable. It was heavy, hardly pleasant to use unplugged and not remotely the experience I’d pictured. I had wanted freedom from a desk and somehow ended up with a computer that made me appreciate having one. That was another very expensive lesson, and I decided “NEVER AGAIN”.
From a Galaxy Far, Far Away to a Very Real Mortgage
Gaming, of course, has influenced considerably more than my choice of computers. It’s also how I met my honey.
We met in Star Wars: The Old Republic, which isn’t the most conventional place to meet the person you’ll eventually build a life with, but then I’ve never been particularly concerned with doing everything conventionally. Somewhere between adventures, quests and conversations, a virtual galaxy introduced me to someone who would become part of my very real world.
Games remained part of our lives. I was still raiding in World of Warcraft almost until R was born, although by then our lives had already begun to change. We bought our house, and R arrived not long after, bringing with him all the happiness, responsibility and financial surprises that come with parenthood.
My mother-in-law likes to say that by the time you’ve raised a child to eighteen, you could probably have bought another house with the money. I used to find that amusing. These days, when I consider how quickly children outgrow clothes, shoes and almost everything else you buy them, I suspect she’s done some rather accurate calculations.
A mortgage, a house and a child have a remarkable way of rearranging your priorities. A new graphics card suddenly competes with a surprising number of other expenses, many of which are significantly less exciting but considerably more urgent. And time becomes just as precious as money. We didn’t stop loving gaming; we simply didn’t have the same freedom to spend an entire evening doing whatever we pleased.
When R was around a year old, we built my current desktop PC. I’d finally had enough of my Alienware laptop, and returning to a desktop felt like coming home. Our usual division of labour worked beautifully: I researched the specifications, compared components and decided what made sense, while honey handled the practical business of assembling everything. I’m the research department; he’s the hands-on engineering department. It’s a good arrangement, provided the two departments agree on the purchase orders.
We chose NVIDIA for that build because it made sense at the time. I was also becoming increasingly fascinated with artificial intelligence, exploring what this new technology could do and how I might use it creatively. It was one of those periods when I found myself learning about computers all over again, though from a rather different perspective than when I’d been twenty.
Nearly four years later, my PC is still perfectly respectable. I play Diablo IV on it, perhaps not on Ultra settings, but comfortably enough that I’m not sitting there mourning every missing shadow or reflection. It still does what I need it to do, which is exactly what I wanted when we built it. And my Adobe apps don’t randomly crash or hang.
Honey’s computer had a rather less glamorous existence. He hadn’t used it properly in years, occasionally borrowing mine when he felt like gaming. His own machine was left sitting quietly in a corner, apparently waiting for someone to remember that it existed.
When we finally opened it, the inside looked like the Batcave after Batman had died. Dust covered an old EVGA GTX 970, an ASUS Republic of Gamers motherboard, a Creative sound card and a Cooler Master power supply, all of them looking as though they’d been abandoned halfway through an important mission. I half expected Alfred to appear with a feather duster and a very disapproving expression.
Yet beneath the dust was a computer that had served him well. There was something satisfying about that. We’d spent years choosing components carefully because we wanted our machines to last, and here was one that had done precisely that. It was outdated, certainly, but it had earned its retirement.
The question was whether there was finally a reason to replace it.
Perhaps Date Night Could Be in Azeroth
With World of Warcraft: Forever approaching, I’d begun thinking about how lovely it might be to play together again. Now that R is a little older, we’re slowly finding small pockets of time for ourselves. Not endless evenings of freedom, naturally, but perhaps an hour here or a couple of hours there.
We don’t go out much. Between work, home, parenthood and everything that needs to be done before you can even think about relaxing, arranging an evening together can feel like organizing a small military operation. And while I love spending time with my family, I’ve also rediscovered how much I enjoy having a little time in a virtual world.
Some people meditate. Others find peace in a yoga session, a good book or a quiet walk. I love exploring. Give me a beautiful forest, a strange city or an unfamiliar landscape in an RPG, and I can happily spend an evening wandering around, following a story or simply enjoying the scenery. I don’t always need to achieve something. Sometimes I just want to be somewhere else for a little while, without another list of responsibilities waiting for my attention.
It occurred to me that this might be something honey and I could enjoy together again. We met in an MMORPG, after all, and before there were mortgages, school schedules and endless domestic responsibilities, there were adventures we shared on a screen. Perhaps we could make time once or twice a week to explore Azeroth together, get hopelessly distracted by something completely irrelevant to our quest, or argue about which direction we’re supposed to be going.
Some couples book a romantic dinner. We might spend an evening trying to remember where we left our characters. Romance, I’ve discovered, can take many forms.
And that was how the idea of building honey a new PC began. Not because he urgently needed the latest graphics card, or because an old GTX 970 had suddenly become an embarrassment, but because I wanted us to have the opportunity to enjoy something together again. The computer was simply the practical part of that rather lovely idea.
Naturally, I was delighted to have an excuse to start researching hardware.
Unfortunately, the hardware industry had apparently spent the intervening years developing an entirely new language.
Have I Become My Grandmother?
I hadn’t ignored technology completely. I still work in IT, and my interest in AI image creation had kept me curious about developments outside gaming. But motherhood, work and life had occupied so much of my attention that I hadn’t followed every new generation of processors, graphics cards and memory.
I assumed it wouldn’t be particularly difficult to catch up. We’d built my PC only a few years earlier, after all. How much could have changed?
Apparently, quite a lot.
DDR5, CL30, PCIe 5.0, X3D, DLSS, FSR and an assortment of other abbreviations were suddenly everywhere. I recognized some, vaguely remembered others and found myself looking up explanations for things that everyone in the comments seemed to understand perfectly.
I’ll admit, I felt a little embarrassed. Here I was, forty-one years old, someone who’d been interested in computers since her twenties, suddenly needing explanations for specifications I’d once have enjoyed discussing. Was this what happened after forty? Did the brain simply reach its storage limit and refuse to accept another generation of technical terminology?
Then I remembered my grandmother. She’s eighty, and whenever I explain something technological to her, I tell her to take out her little notepad and write down the instructions. I’ve always found it rather annoying having to repeat myself to people, although I recently discovered that I was doing exactly the same thing with my computer research. Apparently, the notepad is becoming hereditary.
Love, RAM and a Rather Expensive Shopping List
Once I’d found my way back into the world of computer components, the build began to take shape surprisingly quickly. We wanted something powerful enough to enjoy modern games at higher resolutions, something reliable and well suited to our needs, and something that wouldn’t need replacing simply because another generation of graphics cards appeared next year.
I also wanted it to look beautiful, which is how I found myself falling rather enthusiastically for the Corsair FRAME 4000D RS ARGB in black. It was elegant, with attractive RGB fans and the kind of clean design I could easily imagine sitting on a desk. After inspecting honey’s old computer, good airflow and easier maintenance were particularly appealing. The Corsair case became one of those decisions I made almost immediately and had no particular desire to reconsider.
Around it, I planned an AMD Ryzen 7 9700X processor, an ASUS TUF B850-PLUS WiFi motherboard, 32GB of Corsair Vengeance RGB DDR5 memory, a Corsair liquid cooler, an NVMe SSD and an RM850x power supply. For the graphics card, I liked the Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070 XT with 16GB of video memory. The combination looked powerful, sensible and capable of giving honey a wonderful gaming experience for years.
At least, it looked sensible until I checked the prices again…
We’d been researching the build for roughly three weeks, comparing shops and watching different offers come and go. And there it was: €549 for 32GB of RAM. I actually checked the specifications again, wondering whether I’d accidentally selected something extraordinary. For that kind of money, I half expected it to come with a personal assistant, make coffee or at least remember where I’d left my keys.
The SSD wasn’t particularly modest either. One listing for our 1TB Corsair drive showed €305.02, meaning those two components alone accounted for more than €850 of our proposed computer. I remember when that sounded like a respectable budget for an entire machine.
Our original shopping list had reached €2,697.36, although we’d been hoping to spend closer to €2,000. The frustrating part wasn’t that every component had necessarily become more expensive during those three weeks. Some offers had improved, others had disappeared, and certain models were simply priced far above reasonable alternatives. It was the feeling that building a carefully chosen PC had become far more expensive than I’d expected, even before we’d purchased anything.
I began looking into what was happening in the wider market and discovered that memory and storage prices were under considerable pressure, partly because of the demand for AI infrastructure and data centres. The situation is more complicated than any single explanation, of course, but I couldn’t help appreciating the irony. I’d been using AI to help me understand modern hardware, only to discover that the expansion of AI infrastructure was contributing to some of the pricing problems I was investigating.
Technology helping me understand why technology was getting more expensive. Wonderful.
And as if negotiating with the prices weren’t enough, there was still the matter of the graphics card.
I’d carefully compared the Radeon RX 9070 XT with several NVIDIA alternatives, including the RTX 5060 Ti, RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti. Honey, however, preferred NVIDIA. I brought benchmarks, specifications and price comparisons to the discussion, while he appeared to have brought a rather firm opinion.
The irony wasn’t lost on me. My own computer has an NVIDIA card, chosen because it made sense four years ago, and I have no particular loyalty to AMD. I simply don’t believe that the best choice from one generation automatically remains the best choice in another. Then again, those old hardware forums had taught me that reliability, compatibility and personal experience can matter just as much as performance figures. Honey knows what he likes, and I can understand that.
I still reserve the right to be mildly irritated when several evenings of research fail to produce the conclusion I’d been hoping for.
At one point, I briefly considered whether we should simply build two new computers so we could compare the results ourselves. Purely for scientific purposes, obviously. Unfortunately, the household budget failed to recognize the academic value of my proposal.
What Makes a Computer Worth Building?
For now, our beautiful new computer exists mostly in shopping lists, browser tabs and an increasingly elaborate collection of comparisons. We’re watching prices as Black Friday approaches, hoping to find something genuinely worthwhile rather than a spectacular discount attached to an equally spectacular original price.
The Corsair case remains my favourite part of the plan. I’m still rather fond of the Radeon, honey continues to prefer NVIDIA, and somewhere between those two positions lies a computer we haven’t quite agreed on yet.
But the experience has reminded me of something I learned when I was twenty. Building a computer was never simply about having the newest or fastest equipment. It was about choosing carefully, understanding what you were paying for and getting something good enough to enjoy for years. Back then, I wanted to make every euro count because I couldn’t really afford the computer in the first place. Today, I still want value for my money, although my reasons for being careful have become considerably more respectable. Mortgages and children will do that to a person.
I also find myself appreciating something I didn’t fully understand when I was younger. The worlds I wanted so desperately to explore at twenty eventually introduced me to the person with whom I’d buy a house and start a family. It’s strange to think that a hobby which once seemed like a rather expensive escape from ordinary life became part of the reason my ordinary life looks the way it does today.
And now, more than twenty years later, I’m researching another computer, not simply because I want to see what the newest hardware can do, but because I’d love to spend a little time exploring those worlds together again.
Perhaps that’s what will make this particular build worth the money. Not the specifications, the RGB lighting or whether we eventually choose AMD or NVIDIA, but the evenings we might spend enjoying it. A couple of hours a week, two comfortable chairs and somewhere wonderful to explore would be a rather lovely return on the investment.
Twenty-one years ago, I was willing to spend money I didn’t have on a computer because I wanted to discover extraordinary virtual worlds. I had no idea that one day, one of those worlds would introduce me to the person I’d build a real life with. And now, I’m hoping our next computer will give us a little more time to explore them together.
Although if honey insists on NVIDIA, he’d better appreciate our date nights in Azeroth.
Remember to AFK.
Have you built a gaming PC recently, or rediscovered an old hobby after years away from it? Did you grow up reading computer magazines and forums too? I’d love to hear your stories, especially if gaming has ever brought someone important into your life.