The three-pronged future of custom PC building — from repurposing forgotten parts to ultra-premium works of gaming art

With

, the

,

, and

all happening more or less simultaneously, this is the worst time to build a PC that I can remember — and I built my first PC in the previous century (powered by an

). If you have a rig that meets your needs at the moment (even if just barely), current prices probably make you more interested in

than in considering major upgrades or, even more daunting, starting over from scratch with a new build.

But fret as we might about the future of our much-beloved component-swapping hobby, a few articles and experiences in recent weeks have given me glimpses of the PC-building future, and I don’t think it’s all bad — at least so long as you have time to research and tinker, you can live without the highest-end components, or you have enough of a build budget that price doesn’t matter much.

First off, we recently

, a 2021-era APU that started off as defective or cut-down PS5 silicon, repurposed as a cryptomining card. But more recently, a community-developed BIOS and drivers have turned this custom hardware into a Linux-based competitor to Valve’s much-hyped Steam Machine, while costing roughly half the price of a similarly configured system, once you source the power supply and other necessary parts. It even comes with 16GB of shared GDDR6, sidestepping the current RAM pricing issue altogether.

Now, this is more of a project than a PC. You have to source the card (from places like AliExpress, eBay, or Etsy), then research and figure out how to flash the board so that it will even boot, followed by getting Linux and the requisite drivers installed, before you can even think about playing games. But depending on your sample, you might also be able to unlock extra CPU cores and compute units for even better performance.

It’s far from a simple setup. But this kind of community-led hardware repurposing and enhancement reminds me of two distinct hardware eras: The very early days of PC kits (which I wasn’t really around for), and the early 2000s, when you could unlock AMD Athlon and Duron multipliers with a pencil (or later, conductive silver lacquer).

without paying for a much pricier chip is exactly the kind of achievable dream that the PC enthusiast hobby was founded on, and it’s good to see it making a comeback – even if it’s with this one very specific piece of hardware.

But as AI hardware development continues — and especially if (or when) specific areas of the hardware bubble pop or deflate – I expect to see more situations where communities of tinkerers figure out how to get discarded hardware to run games and other compute tasks, giving budget buyers hope for acceptable performance at reasonable prices. Ironically,

will almost certainly make breakthroughs in hardware repurposing much easier.

On the other end of the PC price spectrum, I

using parts from Asus’ ROG Edition 20 line. The anniversary hardware, which debuted earlier this year at Computex, ignores affordability concerns entirely. Asus instead opted to celebrate two decades of its Republic of Gamers sub-brand by taking several of its already expensive parts and peripherals, adding a few (mostly aesthetic) features and some gold accents, and charging even more for them.

How much more? The finished PC, with about $2,000 worth of peripherals, a

, and a

, costs roughly $15,000 – and that’s with a modest 2TB SSD and 32GB of RAM. If you opt for a more fitting 128GB kit with tight timings and 8TB of solid-state storage, you could easily spend $20,000 on a build like this.

As tough as it is for many of us to swallow, there’s likely a large enough customer base of gamers and PC enthusiasts who can and will pay whatever it takes to own high-end, high-performance PCs to keep options like this afloat. Because while the cost of individual parts has certainly increased, the luxury PC market has existed for decades. I know because in the years before I joined Tom’s Hardware, I reviewed several PCs with custom cooling loops and multiple graphics cards (up to quad-SLI) from the likes of Digital Storm and Maingear. That market isn’t going away; it’s just getting more expensive.

So what about the mainstream PC gaming market? Things are tougher there, and I suspect that space will continue to shrink due to, well, everything I linked to up top. Those looking for gaming options in the sub-$2,000 range that “just work” without much tinkering are more likely to make do with consoles (which are, of course, also getting more expensive), gaming laptops or handhelds, or console-like PCs like Valve’s

.

and

are reviving or extending the lifespan of chips and platforms that support last-gen DDR4, but older memory isn’t getting any cheaper either. And our own testing has shown that DDR4 is increasingly

.

Like it or not, we’ll certainly see further advancements in AI upscaling and other

that make modern gaming possible on older and current-gen cards with 8GB or even 4GB of VRAM before the price of RAM, storage, and GPUs drop significantly.

Will it be enough to keep PC gaming enticing and affordable enough to prop up the mainstream PC gaming market? That’s tough to say with any certainty at this point, but if being a PC enthusiast since the 1990s (and a PC gamer since the late 1980s) has taught me one thing, it’s that this hobby is resilient. Some will pay what they need to pay for high-end hardware. Some will find suitable solutions by tinkering with repurposed silicon. And others will forge a middle ground that works for them.

I transitioned from a PC enthusiast to a full-time professional covering the PC and related hardware space in 2008. Even back then, people were telling me that the desktop was dead or dying. Instead, it has evolved and survived for nearly 20 years, through the smartphone revolution, past soldered-on laptop components, through

, and the

. Meanwhile, game stores like

, indicating that the demand for PC gaming remains high. All this tells me that PC building and PC gaming will need to continue to evolve, but it’s not quite on the endangered hardware list yet.