So, you’re building a PC; with modern components running faster (and hotter) than ever, you’ll need at least one fan. Searches reveal thousands of models bragging about their CFM or noise levels or bearing type. How do you cut through the marketing jargon? This guide for beginners should demystify computer cooling!
If you peruse sites like this, there’s a good chance you’ve come across the monitor discussion. “I’m buying a monitor, what size/resolution/refresh rate should I get?” Choosing the right monitor can be as important as (or, in some situations, even more important than) anything else in your build.
After all, your monitor is how you experience your build. The best graphics card and CPU don’t mean much if the monitor you’re using can’t show you the benefits of those parts.
Often, PC enthusiasts will speak of overclocking the way car enthusiasts discuss high-performance engines, with megahertz and voltage taking the place of horsepower and torque. Overclocking is often a relatively simple way to squeeze out extra performance from computer components; however, problems sometimes do arise. Luckily, most problems faced with overclocking are easily fixed with some basic troubleshooting techniques.
For our purposes, we’ll look at issues affecting the components that are overclocked the most: the CPU and GPU.
So, although the graphics cards have been out for a while now (although still a little hard to get hold of), the games with RTX support haven’t really been there. So now that some games are coming out with shiny RTX options, we’re going to take a look at performance and ask what on earth RTX is actually used for!
PC photo by Nikitarama
Your computer has faithfully been by your side for all these years. You can’t replace it (for whatever reason), but with Christmas coming up, you decide it’s time to give your little friend a much-deserved gift.
Or maybe it’s frustrating you with sluggishness. Either way, you’ve got a great excuse to give it a little performance boost. What I’m here to do is to help you figure out what you can do to upgrade your older system on a budget.
So, let’s discover how to upgrade an older PC.
This list is more suited to people who fit the following:
It is okay if the above doesn’t quite apply to you. This info can still be really helpful. Just keep in mind that you might have different upgrade options than listed.
Choosing RAM can be daunting, because this decision has a tangible impact on your performance. How many browser tabs can you keep open? How smooth is your video editing timeline? How fast will your game load? All of this is directly affected by your choice of RAM.
Late 2025 Update: RAM prices have more than doubled this year, due to astronomical demand from AI datacenters. Unfortunately, this pricing pressure isn’t expected to be alleviated until later in 2026 at the earliest. And since memory factories take billions of dollars and years to build, there won’t be much relief coming from the supply side.
If you’re upgrading and can wait, I would recommend waiting.
If you’re building a new PC and need RAM, shop around and hope to find a deal. Perhaps make the old fashioned choice of buying half the RAM you want now, and buying the second half once prices come back down to earth.
The market for PC components has been a wild ride in recent years. With the cryptocurrency craze driving component prices through the roof throughout most of 2017 and 2018, PC building took a hit and left enthusiasts seriously considering prebuilts (shudder).
But the crypto bubble has popped and other market influences are pushing prices down – for now. Prices for GPUs, the core components gobbled up by cryptocurrency miners, have generally come back down to MSRP, and after a supply shortage that drove up prices, RAM is finally sinking to around 2016 levels. Add to that a diverse market of storage options (HDD, SSD and the newer M.2 drives), as well as other supply improvements that are driving down prices, and you have significantly reduced costs for building a PC.
How long will it last? The latest generation of high-end Nvidia GPUs might be experiencing a string of card failures and low supply is nudging prices up. Meanwhile, US tariffs are pushing some manufacturers to raise prices. The time might be right to start building a PC—or begin looking for an upgrade.
We’ve put together a list of some PC components that provide great value going into the holiday season:
With the launch of the 2nd-generation Threadripper 2950X, we of course had to look at what would make a balanced PC with this 16-core beast!
AMD are coming out swinging, and they’re out for Intel’s blood with the flagship Threadripper 2990WX! With a bonkers 32 cores and 64 threads, this is not a CPU for the casual gamer; it’s a workstation powerhouse, designed for when multi-core performance is king.
In the big wide world of hard drives, SSDs, RAM, VRAM, fancy CPU tech, and more—we felt it was about time to have a bit of a deep dive into data transfer rates.
That way, even if you’re working from an example PC build in our main build chart, you’ll know exactly what kind of speed and overall bandwidth you’re getting for your money!