Every (PC) gamer has been there. The point where you finally have enough to build your new rig. It’s a balance between necessities and nice to have when you are going through your build. One of the main things you will tell yourself is that you can save costs elsewhere in the build to create room for a kickass GeForce RTX 2080 graphics card. You can put in a lower spec power supply unit or solid state drive for now as your build is going to be flexible. In a few months, you will have enough saved up to replace those bottlenecks in your system so that beast of a graphics card can truly fly.

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Sounds familiar? I bet it does. For most, the idea we’ll be replacing parts, later on, is a lie. A lie we keep telling ourselves over and over again. So, what’s really going on here? Do we blatantly just kid ourselves, or is this naivety on the side of PC builders? It’s probably a bit of both.

PC builders and gamers tend to do their homework. Not only do they know what the best GPU (graphics processing unit) on the market is, they also know what would be coming down the line. Wading to lots of benchmark tests, the gamer understands that the GPU could be the one thing that accelerates performance and gives bragging rights. It’s a pride thing as well. In most cases, the GPU will get the core focus. One of the issues is that GPU prices can scale up quite quickly as we go for higher spec cards. The whole bitcoin mining business hasn’t made it easier to get a good GPU that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.

Next, to the GPU, there will be a minimum requirement in terms of processor. As the processor speeds are pretty much as fast as they need to be with 2.6-2.8 GHz, the main thing gamers will look at is the number of cores. This is a funny one as most games are simply not built to handle a multi-core setup. That doesn’t mean that games can’t run on multi-core CPUs (computer processing unit), it simply means they are not optimized for it.

The next two parts we look at is the memory, both storage, and RAM (random access memory). We want quick storage to reduce load times and a hefty amount of RAM to ensure our applications and games have plenty to use. This usually means opting for SSD (solid state drive) and going 16+ GB in RAM.

Once you have your GPU, CPU, SSD, and RAM, you’ll need to connect it all. And this is where to lie comes in: the motherboard (MOBO). MOBOs are very much linked to CPUs and somewhat to GPUs and RAM.

Think of it this way, the MOBO determines the bandwidth of upgrades you can perform and usually determines that upgrades are just incremental. That’s why significant upgrades require generally changing out the MOBO, and if one element gets upgraded, it could mean others should be too. That’s why upgrading your build never seems to be just one item, it’s a set of 3 or 4. This is why PC builders tell themselves they will upgrade but end up replacing the build altogether. But as long as we can tell ourselves that initial lie, we don’t feel so bad splurging on the GPU.