Remember the days when a gaming PC wasn’t synonymous with a bunch of RGB lighting strips? Hate it or love it, the PC gaming industry is here to stay. Whenever either Nvidia or AMD releases a new chip architecture, you drool and curse the industry at the same time. The salivation at the sheer amount of RAM and GFLOPS and the immediate cursing of the bitcoin miners for driving up the prices of GPUs through the roof and way beyond.
And in most cases, we don’t even need all that additional graphical herculean power, because we aren’t running Crysis or Just Cause at the highest settings ever. You just might be running your F2P MOBA or a marathon session of Civ. This unused GPU power is not the only dark secret we carry around, here a few more lies we tell ourselves.
We need as much RAM as we have slots. Not true, it really depends on your operating system, and if it’s 32 or 64-bit, you might already be at capacity. If you are running Windows 10 at 32-bit, your system can only handle 4GB. When you bump up to 64-bit, you should consider running 8GB or more. Most people would consider 16GB the sweet spot (for a 64-bit OS). Going up to 32GB is just silly.
We need as many threads as we can on our CPU, the more, the merrier. Not true. Games developers must build a game around multi-threading. The more multi-threading minded the developer is, the better a game can utilise a duo or quad-core CPU. But any development costs time and money, so developers will go with whatever fits in the development budget. If you look at the games line-up 2 years ago, most of the games would still rely on a single thread. With duo-core being a standard now, you will see more developers taking this into account. The rule is, duo core is standard, quad-core is a luxury and 6 or 8 cores is just showing more money than sense.
We need all hard drive memory on SSD, or even better, PCIe SSD. Not true. Sure, having everything on a fast SSD will make things easier, but what you are looking for to store the OS and anything that requires booting on your fast storage. Things like MP3s (if you are not of the streaming school) and large files usually are fine to keep on a slower, but more cost-efficient standard HDD.
You need to make sure your build is flexible enough to keep updating components. Not true, PC builders very rarely upgrade components after the system is built. In part this will be down to not wanting to go through the effort, on the other hand, it seems like a very wasteful exercise, what do you do with your spare components? There is actually an easy way to sell processors if you want to commit to flexing your build up.
So, there you go, a few things to consider the next time you are planning your new PC build. And if you are really time-poor and cash-rich, why not get someone to build one for you? With all the RGB joy you can humanly fit into a machine.
