How to make a gaming PC during the cryptocurrency craze

It's no secret that crypto miners have driven up the prices of key components to gaming PCs. Most notably, graphics card prices have about doubled in the past few weeks. For example, the popular mid-range Gpu GTX 1060 6GB was retailing for $317.98 three months ago and has now shot up to $550. RAM prices have gone up as well, from around $70 six months ago to about $100 today for one 8 GB stick of DDR4.

Prebuilt makes sense now

Let's say that you're anxious to enter the PC gaming scene, but are not trying to break the bank. Though it would pain most to say it, buying a prebuilt Gaming Pc in some cases would actually be cheaper than building your own. A rig like this CyberPower PC (Gamer Xtreme VR Desktop - Intel i5, 8GB Memory, GTX 1060, 1TB HDD) costs about $200 less than building a similar machine using individually purchased parts. The actual action of building your PC is a great feeling, so a great way of emulating that would be to purchase a case of your choosing separately and then to transfer the components from the prebuilt one into the new case.

It's a good bit of work but it is really satisfying to get it all done. Prebuilt PC cases are often not the best either so it's still an upgrade that can justify spending the extra money (you will still be saving money this way rather than going fully custom-built).

Discounts for gamers

If you're set on fully custom-building your computer, there are ways to hunt discounts for the priciest component, the GPU. Retailers have noticed that miners have been scooping up the graphics cards and causing the shortages and have taken measures to help gamers. A Nvidia spokesperson commented: "gamers come first" referring to their efforts on asking retailers to put gamers over the bulk-buying crypto miners.

Some have heeded Nvidia's words, with the most notable retailer being Micro Center. They have put deals in place where if you purchase all components of a gaming PC from them, you get the graphics card near the MSRP price.

This is a great way to go about it, because a miner would not be purchasing things like a case, CPU, and hard drive for each graphics card. Micro Center is doing this only for in-store locations, so if there isn't one nearby it may be more difficult to capitalize on a promotion like this. AMD GPUs had their prices inflated for many months before this, and now the same has occurred for Nvidia's GPUs.

I would usually suggest that people take a look at used components and see if they can find some good deals on parts from reputable sellers.

However, right now I expect the used market to be dominated by miners selling off their hardware. Though some prices could be tempting, know that many of these miners have severely overclocked their cards, drastically reducing their lifespan and stability. The best suggestion I can give right now is to wait if you can for GPU and Ram prices to stabilize.