June 2023 was going to be the first time in my life when I would build my first-ever gaming PC. No, this doesn’t mean I didn’t have gaming PCs before. This would just be the first time that I’d pay for everything and build everything from scratch — no more borrowing parts from friends and brothers, and no more convincing my dad that an RTX 2070 Super would help me ace my final-semester exams.
June came and went, my partner flew over 1300 miles to join me, and, well, I decided not to build it. Why? Because you only build your first ever, self-earned, self-made gaming PC once in your life. The parts were all there, by the way — I just wasn’t going to put them together unless everything else came together — here are the five things I chose to wait for before actually building my first gaming PC.
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5 I held off on building my gaming PC until I could get its artwork ready
Took me two months to find the time, but it had to be done
This was going to be “The PC”, for me. Heck, I’d spent the better part of a year just staring at an Excel sheet I made of all the parts I needed, along with everything around it to complete the setup. The reason is simple — we’ve all been kids talking to our friends about the latest games, and ending every conversation with “once I buy my own PC, I will —”. This was something I’d dreamed of forever, and I’ll always be pissed about how I dreamed of an all-white build way back in 2010, well before it became mainstream.
Regardless, those conversations with friends had always been about the games that we fell in love with, and this PC, the culmination of that love, wasn’t going to be built in isolation. I decided that I would reconnect with an old hobby, and paint a huge, multi-canvas mural for all the games on my Mount Rushmore — games that taught me powerful lessons. Since the paintings weren’t completed by June ’23, the planned month for the build came around, I held off on the latter.
My paintings for The Last of Us, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Assassin’s Creed II, and Marvel’s Spider-Man would be done first, and only then would I build the PC. This also included a tiny art piece for David and Lucy from the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners show. Then, I followed it up with a stop sign with the Firefly symbol spray-painted on it, all built from clay. Yes, between the paintings, the clay sign, and the moth tattoo on my arm, you could say I really like The Last of Us series.
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4 This was finally the time to splurge on my first gaming chair
I had delayed getting one long enough
This one goes without saying, and it could just as well be included in a list of “things to make sure you buy before building a PC”. I’d been working from home, writing automotive articles for over two years by then, and I’d run through plenty of terrible office chairs or just the ones that you find lying around the house. The reason I held off on buying a real gaming chair was that I wanted everything new, all at once. Yes, this meant a crater in my pocket, but so be it.
So, I chose to go with a gaming chair that had been rotting on my wishlist for over two years by then. It was always going to be a “dream purchase” — too expensive, too tough to justify — but I hit the ‘Add to cart’ button and decided to go through with it anyway. There was no way I’d be able to enjoy a brand-new gaming PC without a brand-new gaming chair. Was this an additional cost to my overall gaming setup? Yes, but it was also a non-negotiable I refused to compromise on.
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3 An appropriately crafted desk ran up the costs
A huge upgrade from two desks in a trenchcoat pretending to be functional
I mentioned that I’d been working from home for a long while — this meant that I did have a desk and workstation set up. Sadly, it was two desks aligned perpendicularly to just get by. An upgrade had been due for the longest time, but I continued holding off on it until I built my PC. So, it was time to contact a local woodworker, give him the dimensions I needed, and then sit with him to build the plans for the desk.
This desk needed to be long enough to have space to waste with a diagonally-placed cabinet, and have enough compartments for embellishments, work equipment, and an entire section for my UPS to sit comfortably in, right underneath the PC. Plus, it needed to be hidden out of sight, and of course, the entire thing needed to be white. Call it my terrible luck, but the contractor fell sick for the longest time, leaving the city and returning a month later to finish my desk while I waited hand over foot for the “perfect desk” that seemed to be delaying my entire build. Thankfully, when it arrived, it was everything I needed it to be, and that made it a little easier to forget that I had just blown another $150 on just the desk.
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2 An uninterruptible power supply was an absolute non-negotiable
I love living in a rainy city, but that also means quick power outages
The problem with moving to a city with the best weather to escape scorching heat, is that it rains a lot. I love the rain, sure, but it also means two-second power cuts at least thrice a day. So, while I don’t lose power for more than 10 seconds a day combined, my PC would end up restarting over three times in the middle of loads. That’s only one of the biggest reasons one should get a UPS.
Now, getting myself a 1000W power supply from MSI also meant that my UPS needed to be pretty beefy — this meant another $250 purchase for the UPS. Every voice in my head screamed at me to just get the PC first, make the build complete, and then purchase the UPS with perhaps the next paycheck. Sure enough, I drowned them out, and put off the build for another month to first have the UPS purchased and ready to go by the time I built the PC.
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1 Embellishments that I wouldn’t comromise for the world
The money I spent here could’ve gone into performance, but it wouldn’t have felt as good
“Embellishments” — these took the most amount of money out of my pocket, and also caused the most delay in building the dream PC. I flew my partner out from across the country to join me in my build, and yet, by that time, the Aero model for the RTX 4070 Ti that I wanted went out of stock. What followed was an entire day of calling up every single store within a 100-mile radius. Nada — the white RTX 4070 Ti Gigabyte Aero was nowhere to be found. I would have to compromise with an Eagle OC, and I even did… almost. When billing time came around, I couldn’t go through with it — all those sleepless nights staring at the Excel sheet of parts, just to make a compromise?
I put in an order with the city’s official Gigabyte supplier, and decided to wait three months instead. That’s when I knew the build wasn’t going to happen, no matter what. Then came more embellishments — the official NZXT vertical GPU mount in white was unavailable everywhere, so it took me days of checking online to come across a Redditor with the exact same problem I had, and he recommended the Lian Li O11 Dynamic’s vertical mount, which would fit my NZXT H9 Flow. Lo and behold, it worked. More embellishments that ran up the costs came in the form of woodworking, where I got shelves made to place my PS4 discs, books, and a separate shelf for the corpses of my older GPUs.
Did I need an all-white mouse, keyboard, and headset? Yes, yes I did — I went ahead and bought the Sony Inzone H7 headset, convincing myself they’d be even more useful when I got my PlayStation 5 (I was right). Did I also need to spend another $120 on Lian Li Strimer cables instead of just bumping up the CPU or the GPU? I didn’t need to, but god, I really wanted to, so I did.
Lian Li Strimer Plus RGB PSU Cable
If you’re looking for a flashy way to spruce up your next build, the Lian Li Strimer Plus is an RGB PSU cable perfect to get that job done. With full control over the colors of your cable via the L-Connect 3 software, the only limitation on customization is your imagination.
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A once-in-a-lifetime rite of passage
This was never about the best specis I could afford.
Look, I know I could’ve gotten an RTX 4080 and a Ryzen 7800X if I’d just ditched the woodwork, the decor, the chair, or even settled for a cheaper cabinet. But this was never about the best specs I could afford. It was about building the dream PC — the one I’d imagined for over a decade, without cutting corners on the personal front.
Sure, this isn’t a guide or a spec breakdown, but it isn’t meant to be, either. It’s a rite of passage — a moment I knew I’d only get once. And if it meant spending a little more time to make it feel like mine, then so be it.
