This market seems insane to buy in, but the market itself scares me. Is it dying? Will building your own gaming pc become a thing of the past with everyone forced into cloud gaming a decade from now?
I don’t project prices ever going down. (Anyone else optimistic enough to try and convince me otherwise?*) But I wouldn’t be surprised at all if some other random components suddenly jumped in price 5x like ram and SSDs have. It’s starting to make me feel like I should buy now, before I have to also spend $1000 each on a psu and motherboard or whatever.
Quick question about cases: How much clearance do you need above listed?
Cooler max height says 169mm, case says 170mm. Totally fine?
PSU max length says 175mm, case says 180mm. That’s too close, right? No room for the cables?
*The ram I had in my parts list had been listed at a steady $1216 for months now, but today is listed at $1195. Prices coming down? Is our long nightmare over? heh.
I want a future-proof 1080p rig that I can drop in a better video card and it immediately becomes a 1440p/4k rig, and I want bequiet fans everywhere. Here’s what I have so far, though I’m hoping for a smaller case:
Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts
$2022.35
Generated by PCPartPicker 2026-06-22 16:50 EDT-0400
I will be bringing my current 2 TB gaming M.2 drive to the new system. It still shows 99% life left. (Samsung 970 EVO.)
I’m also planning on buying a new 4 TB Samsung 870 (2.5" SSD) for a staggering $1249.99, but it’s too shameful and distracting to include in the parts list proper.
32 GB RAM is fine, right? It was finally giving up on my dream of 64 GB that opened the door to building now. I really wanted that 64 GB for future-proofing, but it costs a four-digit number.
The 1000W PSU is to allow dropping in a 5080 or whatever if/when I decide to jump up to 1440p or 4k. Should be good to go, right?
Should I be worried about the 9800x3D catching fire?
Are you interested only in building one, or would you consider prebuilts?
I got this Costco machine last year, and for $1500 it was a good price. It’s $1999 now (higher but not as expensive as it could be — presumably Costco is still going through its stock from the existing/previous orders). There are a few other machines like it on their website.
Word of caution though: iBuyPower (the builder) is pretty hit and miss. With that particular machine, the first two I got from my local warehouse were total lemons (both extremely loud and crashing within minutes of Windows fresh startup, me not having even done anything yet). I had to return both, and then looked for a different batch (going through all the boxes they had there and looking for one with a different SKU and shipment date). That third one was finally the charm, and has been rock-solid, lightning-fast, and whisper-quiet. (The same model won’t always have the same parts, like their mobos and GPUs could be different between SKUs and batches.)
It runs all the games I play on ultra or high at 3440x1440 100+ FPS, but only with DLSS set to Balanced or Performance (no framegen).
That prebuilt I linked would get you an upgrade to a 5070 plus liquid cooling — I never hear my fans, even when gaming. You could plop the other SSD in and sell the 4070 and come out quite ahead, I think?
For games? 32 is fine. 16 is probably fine. For AI or other workloads, you’d probably want more VRAM anyway…?
What did you want the 64 for?
Is that a reference to something…? That’s the CPU I have in that prebuilt I linked to, and it’s been great with the liquid cooling setup. Stable and fast.
Money isn’t an issue in terms of affording it; I just find it distasteful to spend so much on ram and hard drives on principle. Like how I’ll wait 18 months for a game to go on sale for $17 (Cyberpunk!) instead of paying $30, heh.
I did finally come into the extra money to play with I had earmarked for a new tv and new computer. Just last week upgraded my TV from a crappy 46" from 10 years ago to a nice 65" LG OLED C5. It’s pretty awesome, so now my sights are set on the computer.
I’d rather build my own “perfect” rig for a few dollars more.
EDIT: I bought a budget iBuyPower prebuilt in 2013, which was an odd shape (couldn’t use it as a table), had super loud fans and ugly led lights. I suffered with that for 8 years until I replaced it in 2021 by building my current beautifully silent black box, and I don’t think I can go back to prebuilts.
Makes sense. The main reason I suggested prebuilts is that there’s still a backstock of them from existing contracts that haven’t been hit as hard as the retail parts — yet. But if money isn’t an issue, yeah, you can get much better parts if you hand-pick each one.
My 2c: 64 GB won’t do you much good for gaming. I’ve had several 64 GB machines and several 32 GB machines, and RAM was never a limiting factor in either of them. Unless you wanted to load a bunch of games from the SSD onto a RAM drive for even faster loading times, I don’t see the point there, especially at current prices.
The RAM isn’t like the other parts (CPU and GPU) in that you can’t just throw more money at it to make PC go vroom… if the apps you’re running don’t need that much, having globs of spare RAM lying around isn’t going to anything for them.
Edit: IMHO for a several hundred dollar difference (between 32 GB and 64 GB), there are much more fun things you could spend it on (and that aren’t as impacted by Rampocalpyse):
A nicer monitor: OLED and/or ultrawide if you don’t already have one
Getting that 5080 sooner
Peripherals like steering wheels, flight sticks, VR (if you’re into that), high-quality controllers, better headphones/speakers
I think just about anything else you can throw money at would be a more meaningful upgrade than going from 32 to 64 just for gaming. I don’t think there’s much to “future proof” there… 64 GB has been available and affordable for consumer desktop PCs for quite a while now, before Rampocalypse, and games haven’t really ballooned to take advantage of that. They certainly won’t now, if they want any players to buy it.
They are often VRAM-choked with larger textures and shaders and such, but I struggle to think of any title, genre, or engine that would meaningfully benefit from an additional 32 gigs of desktop memory rather than VRAM. Maybe Cities Skylines 2 if you used mods to load a mega-ginormous megapolis and let the simulation run for two years straight…
Exactly. Purely for theoretical future-proofing. Nothing I’m aware of that I would actually do needs it now or will in the next few years at least. Your exact question here is what I finally asked myself.
When I built my current rig in 2021 I started with 16 GB, and then like 8 months later dropped in another 16 GB of the same kit (different batch) and have been humming along with 32 GB ever since. But everything I read points to limiting high end rizen chips to only two ram sticks, so for years I’d assumed this next machine would have a single set of 2x32.
Finally realizing that I probably won’t actually need 64 GB for the life of this next machine was a light switch moment that snowballed into thinking maybe I could build now. (That and re-using the 2 TB games drive I’m already using now.)
Yeah, I mean, I did play the first Cities Skylines for (checks steam) 767.8 hours, lol, so building this machine with Cities Skylines 2 in mind is definitely a consideration.
I can afford 64 GB without stretching, it’s just that it would feel so gross. Is it generally accepted that it runs totally fine with 32 GB?
Anecdotally, it has for me, but I’m not a heavy player — only 30 hours so far. But it ran fine even before all the patches and my current machine. I played it mostly at 1.0 release state, on a GeForce Now virtual machine (unknown how much RAM that has, but probably not 64). My cities were just normal sized though, like however much the base game lets you expand to without mods. I also only ran a few mods (like 6-8, I think). Mostly I played it to import my real-world city as a terrain map, traced over it and added real neighborhoods and then trams everywhere, lol. Going ginormous was never my goal.
We do have another poster here who DOES play that game a lot… I just can’t remember who off the top of my head Maybe Askance or msmith537 over at Cities: Skylines II is out ? (That’s what AI says, anyway) IIRC, Askance works on the Cities Skylines 2 team in some capacity.
Well, crap. I had just been seeing complaints about burning plugs popping up here and there on reddit over the last few months so I googled News for a cite, and, bummer:
That is indeed my exact motherboard, so I guess now I have to read up on this myself.
The short version of this is that, after looking through everything, we think that the result of all this is improper installation, which is something a lot of Reddit users were pointing out when looking at the photos online.
Man… that was a lot of words for “they shorted it and fried it”
Indeed. In the specific case of the video above, it was user error installing the processor incorrectly (offset about a millimeter laterally and slightly downward, and not square to the contact grid). The offset displaced contacts onto socket pins they weren’t supposed to touch, leading to several catastrophic short circuits at the socket interface level (which drew destructive current flows in other parts of the motherboard).
I just measured the space and it looks like the meshify 2 won’t fit particularly well because it’s over 4" longer than my current case, ~21.5" vs ~17".
My first choice case, the meshify 3, has a max PSU length of 180 mm, but the PSU I really want is 175 mm. I’m getting mixed reports on whether the case’s number leaves room for modular cables. Is that too tight?
My second choice is the torrent compact, but I can’t find anyone selling the version with a solid side panel.
My third choice is anything that fits a 169 mm cooler, 300 mm GPU (though longer would be better for eventual upgrade) and 175 mm PSU. But ideally not much bigger than 18" x 9" x <any height is fine>. Solid side panel with mesh front preferred.
I skimmed most of this thread so maybe these are covered, but I’d ditch the surplus fans, the 1TB SSD (just use your 2TB), and probably switch to the Thermalright Peerless Assassin since it’s a great value. All the big dual tower heatsinks are good enough performance-wise, especially if you’re not overclocking.
Like, I don’t particularly understand why you’d pay a premium on a bunch of purportedly quiet components but then get a mesh case. Get a solid case if you care about noise. Temperatures will be fine.
Have you thought about going mATX to save a few more bucks? If you’re not so worried about money, what about using those savings to upgrade to mITX? I’d go mITX for sure if I was buying a new everything.
You can probably save a few more hundred if you find a 9800X3D + RAM bundle from a vendor since that’s one of the only ways to move parts now. They’re basically giving away motherboards.
The quieter fans are actually more important to me for a mesh case because you can hear them more clearly. Mesh because I’m designing with an eye toward a video card upgrade down the road. Airflow seems to be the smart play for a high power gpu.
Regarding mITX, why would that be your first choice? No concern about thermals? My initial thought was that I’m having enough trouble finding a compact case to fit my components, but then again, it’s never a problem that the case is too short. Cooler height needs case width, and both gpu and psu need case length. Case height is irrelevant in terms of fitting stuff, so mITX could be good. I worry about thermals, though.
Is there a specific mITX case you would pick right now if you were building all new?
Concerns about thermals are overblown. Content creators are probably to blame, but the debate between noise vs temperature is decades old. Yeah, you can get yourself in trouble if you do something really dumb. In your case, you have a huge dual-tower heatsink. You’re looking at a tier of cases where all the designs are competent enough. You’re fine.
For example, I currently have a Define R4 with 1x 140mm in the front and 1x 140mm in the rear. Very basic setup. It’s fine. Could I drop from 67c to 62c with a mesh case? Probably, but who cares? I’d rather have the 5db less from the soundproofing. That’s a 5800X3D and 4090 so very comparable to a 9800X3D / 5080.
mITX is trendy. PCs have fewer add-in board, fewer drives, smaller drivers, etc. SFX PSUs got a lot better. I like the blue Fractal Era 2. Great colour. I like how Fractal uses mixed materials. I’d probably get the Define Nano S because it’s the most soundproof. (It also supports ATX instead of SFX PSUs, which saves a lot of money.) These are all large cases from mITX standards.
Maybe Askance or msmith537 over at