Building a gaming PC is too expensive, and GPUs really don’t help
Gatekeeping is something that comes up a lot, right? It’s clearly frowned upon as obnoxious, off-putting and generally unnecessary – whether we’re talking about gaming, music, movies, books, you name it. New fans aren’t going to ruin Metallica for you just because they’re, well, new, and they like St Anger. I’m not here to talk about that garbage can snare drum though – no. I’m here to talk about PC gaming and how absolutely fiendishly expensive it has become to even get into the ecosystem.
It’s stupid. Really stupid. I bought my first gaming PC in 2011. It was a pretty solid build at the time: Intel Core-i5 2500K, 8GB DDR3, a nice BitFenix Shinobi chassis, it works. The crowning glory of that thing, however, was the graphics card, an MSI Twin Frozr GTX 460, complete with 1GB of VRAM, on Nvidia’s Fermi architecture at 40nm. Perfect for a bit World of Warcraft: Cataclysm plunder with my guild Fracture at the time. It’s a card that retailed for $250, but I paid about half that for the GPU (£130 in the UK to be exact). In January 2013 I upgraded to a GTX 660, Asus DirectCU II, with 2 GB of VRAM. That card was available for £155 (retail $229), and offered much more performance and twice the memory (for less money in the US).
Flash forward to 2024, and it’s a completely different game. To even get close to a comparable model, you’re looking at a minimum of around $320, and that’s on the low side. That is an increase of 40% over a period of eleven years. However, take mid-range and high-end cards, packed with even more goodies, and that price skyrockets even higher. RTX 4090s debuted for, what, $1,800? Even the best Titans used to land around $800 to $1,000. That’s almost double the cost of the favorite flagship GPU.
The point, though, is that the more you look at the details – at how it all fits together – the more you realize that many of these price increases are actually very closely linked to inflation. Especially with the cheaper GPUs anyway. $229 in 2013 equates to about $310 in today’s numbers – about right for the low prices I mentioned.
I would begrudge less if there were no economies of scale, and continued progress and production improvements should lead to a reduction in overall costs, as we have seen with TVs for example.
Yes, of course there is the argument that these companies need to make money, and that comes with R&D costs, but still, graphics cards and products just haven’t dropped in price like they used to. And the thing is, these companies clearly have the profit margins to do this. With current inflationary pressures worldwide, Nvidia, AMD and Intel have all launched new product lines in the past twelve months, all of which match or cost less than their namesake predecessors. A good PR move – and a smart sales move.
Purchasing power, building complexity and influencers
I believe there are much more complex issues at play here. As far as I can tell, there are three main reasons why buying a mid-range gaming PC today is a lot more painful than it used to be with the old wallet.
First on the agenda, local purchasing power has not kept pace with inflation. Certainly not in the US. If you look at real median household income in the United States from 2013 to 2023, it increased by only 18.2%, a far cry from the cumulative inflation of 35.4% over the same period. Simply put, wages have not kept pace with rising costs. Why that is the case is more of an argument for those in the political sector than for me, but the statistics don’t lie and its impact is clear.
The second, and more pressing factor, is the radical increase in the number of companies making better and better components for every facet of a modern gaming PC.
While entry-level and mid-range graphics cards (which still make up the vast majority of sales, I might add) are surprisingly on track with inflation in terms of affordability, the rest of the PC ecosystem is not the case. Higher-end GPUs, as well as CPUs, motherboards, RAM and SSDs, have all seen big increases in overall costs.
Sure, if you compare the product lines, Asus ROG Hero motherboards used to come in at just under or over $200, and now one of the latest models will cost you almost $700. And then there’s everything. Cooling, lighting, fans, custom keyboards, monitors, the works. Everything is now a specialized product, and all of that adds to the overall cost of building a PC.
Finally, thanks in part to influencers, and the internet more broadly, it’s no longer enough to just have a windowless chassis packed with the core hardware. The humble gaming PC has become an ornament, littered with RGB lighting and enough accessories to make even the most avid kleptomaniacs blush. It’s a struggle to stay on social media for five minutes without getting an Instagram Reel or YouTube Short from someone showing off an epic PC build or gaming space, complete with a $1,200 GPU and RGB lighting that costs almost as much .
All that comes together to push an average system far beyond the reach of an average wallet. Consoles aren’t faring any better either, with games like the PS5 Pro debuting for nearly $700. Once upon a time, building a custom gaming PC that was more powerful than a console for comparable money was a good reason to jump on the PC bandwagon jump. Now it is a utopia. A memory from the mists of time.
Intel is strangely leading the way
That’s why Intel’s latest move with the Arc B580 graphics card has got so many people talking (for once in a positive way). The latest generation of desktop processors (Core Ultra 200S) may not have been released as oven-ready as Intel had hoped, but Team Blue’s new Battlemage graphics card? Oh boy, it’s top notch, at least in terms of value.
Our own John Loeffler took a look at the Intel Arc B580 in late 2024, and it absolutely beats 1440p gaming, which, let’s face it, is slowly becoming the de facto resolution for most modern PCs at this point (sorry 4K, you are still too damn expensive).
But the most important thing by far is the fact that the B580 does very well in just about every game you throw at the GPU right now, beating the Nvidia RTX 4060 and AMD RX 7600 XT. No – it’s the fact that it does this while being 20% cheaper than the cheapest of those cards, and it’s easily better than the RTX 4060 Ti in terms of value proposition, given the relative performance of the two GPUs. Well played, Intel. Well played.
Team Blue has made a big statement with this. Intel has repeatedly said it’s targeting the entry-level gaming market, and if I’m honest, I’m happy about that. AMD held on to that mantle nicely, beating Nvidia in the lower price range, while Team Green dominated the high-end – but those plucky Team Red GPUs have since lost their affordable luster.
Intel appears to be making some serious comebacks with its Arc GPU line – at least for now. This will hopefully lead to both AMD and Nvidia countering their own price cuts, and that will be a big positive for all of us.
What will all this lead to?
Yet this is just one drop in the ocean. One part of many. PCs are still too expensive. The PS5 Pro launched at almost $700, and more and more we’re seeing this ecosystem that used to be so inclusive that people were just priced out of it. If you want to get into PC gaming or even console gaming, it’s so hard now with modern hardware. This is just a fact. Do you want the best experience? It is best to take out a loan or remortgage the house.
There has always been an ‘us and them’ mentality when it comes to PC gaming. Always a red vs. blue, or green vs. red, or PC vs. console conflict. The latter in particular is an age-old story, but not one born of cost: it’s built on things like ease of use, graphical fidelity, or mouse and keyboard versus controller. There were no artificial financial gatekeepers like there are now.
The point is that unless there is a radical change in the world of PC components and the way they are made, it’s hard to see how any change will happen. Prices will only rise, wages will only stagnate further and the situation can only escalate. Combine that with the threat of Trump’s US trade tariffs adding an additional 20% to 60% to the cost of those imported components, and you have a recipe for disaster.
The glimmer of hope, at least for GPUs, is the challenge that Intel’s Arc Battlemage and the new B580 pose to the current duopoly – and the hope that a rumored B770 model could lead to further price cuts (although the high-end model is likely will remain Nvidia’s domain, unfortunately).