Ignore the hype on these PC upgrades

When you’re already inside the PC rabbit hole, the story of PC upgrades never stops. It’s a never-ending tale of waiting for the next big thing, scouring for the best deals, and trying to justify each upgrade. With PC hardware prices having entered a new normal post-pandemic, upgrading your PC with the latest and greatest hardware demands serious cash, but what’s worse is that the “best” upgrades often aren’t worth the premium.

In every industry, a few products tend to get overhyped without offering value in line with their asking price. You will feel nice about buying and owning the most expensive PC components for a while, but by all standards, they aren’t worth the money you have to shell out. You might be convinced that you absolutely need them, but that’s just wishful thinking.

8

AIOs and case fans with screens

How many LCDs do you really need?

Even without getting into the most needless PC upgrades, you might end up overspending on cooling hardware alone. Modern CPUs need more cooling than ever before, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do without a 360mm AIO with a customizable OLED screen. Sure, it’s fun to display your CPU temperature or a silly GIF on top of your CPU, but is it really worth $300-$400?

Even case fans these days come with customizable LCDs and magnetic snap-on connections to eliminate cables. If you really want a secondary display to view real-time system stats and FPS, why not save hundreds of dollars and buy a 5-inch LCD from Amazon and connect it via USB and HDMI to your PC? It can do everything an AIO liquid cooler or case fan with a screen can do at a fraction of the price.

As for magnetic daisy-chaining, you’ll need to spend around $300 for six of these fancy case fans. For something that you’ll install only once during the build phase and maybe remove a few times for cleaning in the lifetime of the PC (let’s be real here), it’s hardly worth spending three to four times the price of, say, six regular RGB case fans.

7

High-end OLED and 360Hz monitors (plus peripherals)

The best isn’t that far from the rest

Spending on a quality monitor and peripherals is an integral step in creating a great PC setup, but at what point does it get too much? OLED monitors represent the current pinnacle of display technology, offering unparalleled contrast, HDR, and true blacks, but the only ones worth buying cost around $700-$1,000 or even more. Compared to a great IPS monitor that you can get for around $300, an OLED monitor is clearly not three times as good.

If you consider 360Hz OLED monitors, you’ll still need around $750 for one of the best gaming monitors on the market. Even for esports titles, an average gamer won’t feel a perceptible difference going from 240Hz to 360Hz, and for most gamers, 144Hz is still great for both single-player and multiplayer games. With time, OLED and comparable Mini-LED monitors will come down in price, but until then, the excellent experience of OLEDs is not worth the price premium.

Other peripherals like a gaming headset, keyboard, and mouse might seem affordable compared to a high-end monitor, but the cost can add up if you decide to get the best of the best in all three departments. A wireless gaming headset, mechanical gaming keyboard, and decent gaming mouse can together cost anywhere from $500 to $750 — the same as a modern high-end graphics card.

Expensive peripherals will not make you a better gamer, and frankly, they don’t justify their cost, even in the features and comfort department. You can get the same experience with mid-range variants for $300 total for the headset, mechanical keyboard, and mouse.

6

Bleeding-edge Gen5 SSDs

The “generation gap” is totally fine

You might be feeling under the weather with a bit of FOMO if you have a Gen4 NVMe SSD on your PC, considering some Gen5 SSDs now offer twice the speed of the fastest Gen4 drives. However, I assure you that you’ll recover and realize that you never needed a Gen5 SSD, not for gaming and not even for your occasional multi-thread workloads.

You see, only those running regular professional workloads can make use of the blazing-fast sequential transfer speeds of Gen5 SSDs. The rest of us playing games, multitasking, and booting Windows daily will not benefit in any way by upgrading from a Gen4 to a Gen5 SSD. Even DirectStorage, the flagship gaming feature of Gen5 SSDs, hasn’t been adopted outside a handful of games.

Gen5 SSDs will become more popular and cheaper with time, and just like Gen4 SSDs slowly replaced Gen3 models, they’ll become worthy upgrades over Gen4 SSDs. However, now is not the time to waste money on an expensive Gen5 NVMe SSD.

5

Ultra-fast DDR5 RAM

You don’t need an 8000MT/s memory kit

Once DDR5 RAM became affordable and brought faster memory frequencies to all, PC users began wondering how fast their RAM should be. While 6,000MT/s CL30 memory is still considered the sweet spot for AMD CPUs, Intel systems can take advantage of slightly faster 6,400-6,800MT/s memory. That said, you still don’t have a good enough reason to splurge on expensive 8,000MT/s or faster memory kits.

Even if you’re getting a 7,000-7,200MT/s kit for the same price as a 6,400-6,800MT/s kit, there are other considerations at play. AMD CPUs usually don’t like anything faster than a 6,000MT/s kit, so you can easily run into stability issues with your ultra-fast DDR5 RAM. Plus, even on Intel systems, your motherboard might not even support these cutting-edge memory speeds.

A cursory search on Amazon will show you that 8,800MT/s memory kits are also available, but the performance difference compared to a much slower kit will be negligible. And the price you’ll need to access these speeds makes the whole exercise futile.

4

Full-tower PC cases

$400 PC cases? Think again

The case is one of the components that can hijack your PC budget if you’re not careful. PC builders usually leave the case for last, focusing on the rest of the components and picking a PC case that looks good at the end. As long as you’re selecting something that will fit each of your components, has enough airflow, and doesn’t cost more than $150, you’ve made a great decision in my book.

However, some users fall into the trap of “bigger the better”, and end up buying a $300 or even $400 full-tower case designed for custom watercooling and an absurd number of case fans. While some users might actually need the largest case they can get their hands on, most people buying these cases don’t. Custom liquid cooling is overkill for even the most high-end CPUs and GPUs today, and you don’t need anything bigger than a mid-tower, dual-chamber case for 99% of builds.

Swapping your existing case for an expensive full-tower case or picking the latter for a new build should be done only after careful consideration. Chances are none of your components or future upgrades will need the space or features provided by a full-tower case, and you’re better off spending the money you save on the core components.

3

1200W+ power supplies

No one needs unlimited power

The importance of buying a quality PSU can’t be overstated, but it’s all too common to see PC builders lapping up overspecced power supplies for their gaming rigs. Choosing the right wattage, a good enough efficiency rating, and, ideally, a modern standard is essential when buying a new PSU. Still, most users aren’t building systems that necessitate a 1000W power supply, let alone a 1200W or 1600W one.

If you’re upgrading to a high-end graphics card like the RTX 4070 Ti Super or RTX 4080 Super, an 850W 80+ Gold power supply is more than enough. Even the most powerful graphics card on the market, the RTX 4090 (and soon, the RTX 5090), only needs a 1000W power supply. The rest of the components of even these high-end PCs won’t change anything in terms of the recommended PSU wattage.

Hence, buying more power than you need for your PC, after including buffers and safe limits, isn’t recommended, unless you don’t care about money at all.

2

Decked-out motherboards

The mother of all needless luxuries

The motherboard is undoubtedly an important part of any PC, and it’s worth deliberating before picking the right one. However, you shouldn’t assume that only $300+ motherboards will be good enough for your build, and anything cheaper will be “poor quality” or “incompatible” with the other components. I’m not suggesting going for the cheapest motherboard you can find, but there’s an easy sweet spot to be had.

For a mid-range gaming PC with, say, the Ryzen 5 7600 and the RTX 4070 Ti Super, all you need is a B650 chipset motherboard with decent build quality, two to three M.2 ports with one being PCIe 5.0, support for your preferred memory kit, Wi-Fi & Bluetooth, PCIe 4.0 expansion slots, and a decent I/O selection. And thankfully, you can get all of these features in a $150-$160 motherboard. The same holds true if you’re upgrading your motherboard (which usually happens in conjunction with a CPU upgrade).

Expensive motherboards priced over $500 might include metal covers, RGB lighting, overkill VRM solutions, 4 M.2 ports, 10GbE LAN, Wi-Fi 7, and support for up to 9,500MT/s RAM, but none of these will improve performance, save for enthusiast overclocking. Even if you want a specific motherboard design, such as a white motherboard, you only need to spend around $225 for the privilege.

1

Flagship graphics cards

The point of diminishing returns

The world of graphics cards is a curious one — none of us are ever happy with the performance we get for the price, and yet we keep discussing GPUs ad nauseam. If you’re about to upgrade your graphics card, there are largely three ways to go about it — you either settle for a budget GPU good for 1080p gaming, a mid-range value model for decent 1440p gaming, or a high-end card capable of high-end 1440p and 4K gaming.

The higher you go on the product stack, the cost per frame steadily keeps decreasing to a point, after which it starts to increase pretty fast. This is why, historically, Nvidia’s 60-series and 70-series cards have been the most popular among all of its offerings. Even among the current-gen models, the RTX 4070 Super is perhaps one of the best GPUs based on the performance you get for the price.

You could spend a bit more on the RTX 4070 Ti Super, but anything more than that, and it stops making sense for the majority of people. Yes, the RTX 4080 Super offers superb performance in pretty much any title at any resolution, but you don’t really need to spend over $1,000 to enjoy 1440p or even 4K gaming. Thanks to AMD’s GPUs like the RX 7900 XT or even Nvidia’s RTX 4070 Ti Super, $800 is all you need to spend on a gaming GPU.

Buyer’s remorse is going to hit you harder if you spend $1,000 on a GPU compared to $600 or $800, especially since even a grand doesn’t get you more than 16GB VRAM on Nvidia GPUs. And if you include AIO-cooled models in the discussion, there’s no telling how much money you’ll end up wasting on a graphics card, which is just one component of your PC.

Save your money, upgrade wisely

In this economy, it’s more important than ever to preserve your funds for needs rather than wants, and PC upgrades clearly fall into the latter bucket. If you absolutely need to upgrade, see if you can buy used PC components to save money or wait for a big sale for prices to drop. If you can’t wait anymore, consider opting for mid-range products that offer a lot of the performance of high-end products but at a significantly lower price point. And always avoid FOMO sucking you into overspending on PC components.