
I do this in Notes on my phone, with the title of each build right up at the top. Additionally, I recommend keeping a list of what you want, what you have, and what your budget is. It even has a few example builds you can tweak to your liking. Not only does it have everything you need to buy, it also lets you build your PC piece by piece right on the website and makes sure all your hardware will play nicely together. In order to get a list of components together, no matter what your experience level is, you should use PCPartPicker.

All of my most cost-effective PC builds have been slow and steady ones.


Grab components when they're cheap, hold on to 'em and keep an eye out for a good price on what you need next. We've added buying advice to each category most affected by the shortage to speak more specifically to each component's scarcity (or abundance now that prices are falling), but in general just know that building a gaming PC, even as prices come down, might be a little more expensive than you expect.
