PC Builds & Upgrades

After months of RAM, SSD, GPU, and motherboard prices climbing across nearly every article we’ve written this year, here’s something genuinely unusual: a major PC cooling brand just lowered its prices. Arctic — known for its Liquid Freezer AIOs and Freezer air coolers — is rolling back tariff-era price increases across its entire US lineup […]

A Samsung 990 Pro 1TB that cost about $90 in October 2025 now sells for around $200. That’s not a typo, and it’s not an isolated case — budget drives from Crucial and Lexar have seen similarly dramatic jumps. If you’ve shopped for storage recently and felt like prices didn’t match your memory of a

AMD just re-released a four-year-old CPU, and it sold out in minutes. The Ryzen 7 5800X3D 10th Anniversary Edition launched at $349 in late June, was scalped for $600–750 on eBay within hours, and has now settled back into stock at retailers with a genuinely strong bundle deal. If you’re on an AM4 motherboard, this

Valve’s Steam Machine launched at $1,049, runs through a randomized reservation lottery instead of normal retail sales, and the waitlist is already expected to stretch into 2027. Naturally, PC builders are asking the obvious question: why wait for a lottery when you can build a SteamOS PC yourself? The honest answer is more nuanced than

If you’re planning a high-end PC build right now, the honest answer is: it depends heavily on which component you mean. GPU prices are climbing for the third time this year. Motherboard makers are preparing price hikes as steep as 50%. And yet flagship CPUs are sitting at some of their lowest prices ever. This

RAM and SSD prices have surged by 90% or more in a single quarter of 2026 — not because of a chip shortage in the traditional sense, but because AI data centers are buying up the memory supply that used to go into ordinary PCs. If you’re planning a build or upgrade right now, this

Your GPU can only show you what your monitor lets it. If you’ve built a solid budget rig but you’re still gaming on an old 60Hz panel, a monitor upgrade is often the single biggest visible improvement you can make – and in 2026, under $300 genuinely buys features that used to be premium-only: Mini

If you’re building or upgrading a budget gaming PC, the headset is one of the easiest components to overpay for. The good news: in 2026, €50 (or less) genuinely buys you a solid gaming audio experience — clear positional cues, a usable mic, and comfort for long sessions. You just need to know which models

Both the RTX 4060 and RX 7600 sit in the same $270–310 price bracket and target the same buyer: someone building a budget 1080p (or light 1440p) gaming PC. They’re close enough in raw rasterization performance that different review outlets have reached different conclusions about which one is actually faster – so rather than pretend