PC Buying Guide

Is this finally a good time to buy or build a new PC? For the past year, the market has been plagued with component shortages and skyrocketing prices, but things are starting to look better. Let's take a look at how the market has changed in the past few months...

With Alder Lake, Intel has mostly retaken the gaming throne, at least until the release of AMD's Ryzen 5800X3D, but the differences are nothing like they were in previous generations, and arguably limited to unrealistic situations. Support for DDR5 memory and PCIe 5.0 graphics cards is also more of a bragging right than a useful feature for now. Between two current-gen CPUs with the same number of threads, you should probably pick the cheaper one for gaming, considering cooling and motherboard prices.

In response to Alder Lake, AMD has slashed the pricing of Ryzen 5000 CPUs, and announced new parts that are almost as fast for tens of dollars less. After years of healthy CPU competition, the market is full of great options for PC owners that haven't upgraded in some time. It's too bad that new budget parts like the Core i3-12100 suffer from poor availability right now.

In the high end, AMD still dominates. With 64MB of cache and up to 32 threads, the top Ryzen 9 CPUs are still faster, or at least more efficient, when fully utilized. Intel never had an answer to Threadripper 3000, which is now terribly overpriced, and AMD has made the new Threadripper 5000 series OEM-only, so Ryzen 9 may be the most sensible choice for core-heavy workloads unless you're building something powerful for your business needs.

Graphics card prices have seen a huge improvement in the past couple of months. While most Nvidia cards are still far from selling at MSRP levels, mainstream AMD cards are quickly getting closer to that mark.

Pricing for all but the cheapest SSDs remains reasonable, and if you still use a spinning disk for anything except long-term storage of large files, then you should definitely take advantage of that. Most notably, DDR4 memory prices are still about half of what they were a few years ago.

If you don't need the very best GPU or a server-grade CPU, then you can now get great value for your money with a new PC. In this PC Buying Guide update we've included four recommended component lists, meant for different budgets and purposes...

The Remote-Office Box $500

• Good performance • Fast for everyday computing • Gaming with add-on GPU

The Value Gaming Rig $750 + $250 GPU*

• Excellent performance • Great multitasking • Perfect for gaming

The High-End Gaming Machine $1300 + $700 GPU*

• High-end performance • Heavy multitasking • Hardcore gaming

The Humble Workstation $2000 + $700 GPU*

• Workstation-like performance • Extreme multitasking • Hardcore gaming

Our recommendations were influenced by availability and pricing at the time of writing.

If a component from the list that you were considering is unavailable or significantly more expensive while you are reading this guide, fear not. We included an explanation for every one of our choices, so that you can make alternative and informed purchases.