The short answer to the question posed in the headline is, “No. No, you can’t. Nothing about computers is affordable anymore in this era of AI market manipulation and speculation.”
RAM is currently marked up more than 400 percent over MSRP. Graphics cards are selling for way more than sticker price everywhere in the world except China. The 2TB Samsung SSD that I bought for US$119 (plus sales tax) in September 2025 now sells for $500 on a good day. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together . . . mass hysteria!
Ahem.
Long story short: if you don’t absolutely, positively need a new computer right now, don’t friggin’ buy or build one. The AI Ponzi-scheme bubble that is propping up the global economy is not sustainable for much longer, China is rumored to be flooding the global market with RAM selling for something resembling MSRP in the coming year, and it stands to reason that you’ll be able to afford a lot more PC for your buck in the future than you can right now, assuming you can afford anything at all. But that wouldn’t fit in a headline, would it?
But what if you had no choice but to build a new computer right now?
The truth of the matter is, I recently found myself with a completely dead PC on my hands—cooked PSU, dead motherboard, fried RAM, and even a toasted front panel, rendering the case useless—meaning I had no choice but to build a new computer at the second-worst time to build a computer I’ve ever lived through. So this is the story about how I did so with an eye toward something resembling a budget in these dark times, but without compromising sound quality, in case you’re in a similar situation.
I said this is the second-worst time I’ve ever lived through with regard to PC building. The absolute worst was 1984, when my dad and I spent $4200 of his money building our first 80286-based IBM clone. That would be about $13,400 in today’s dollars, although to be fair, that figure only accounts for inflation (CPI is a bullshit metric, to be honest) and not real buying power. But still, $4200 was a lot of scratch in 1984, any way you slice it.
But back to the present. Given that I had no choice but to build or buy right now, what sorts of choices did I make to value-engineer an acceptable PC that fit my needs?
To answer that question, we can start by talking about what an “audiophile” PC even means. You can start by checking out AJ Wykes’s recent article on SoundStage! Simplifi about the different use-cases that might affect your desktop audio solution. It’s a good ’un. For me, though, building an audiophile-quality computer—not the desktop audio system, but the computer behind it—boils down to having a good, clean power supply (most modular offerings these days fit the bill, but big-brand pre-builts from the likes of Dell, which often rely on proprietary hardwired power supplies, rarely rise to the occasion), quiet operation without running hot (we’ll dig deep into that below), and—in an ideal world—a motherboard that has a TosLink audio output.
It’s true that in most instances these days, you’ll be relying on some form of outboard USB audio solution, be it an interface or DAC or external sound card, but I like to feed my SVS Prime Wireless active speaker system an optical signal, as I find that it reduces the chances of audio interference from my nearby lamp or from the computer itself. So, given my druthers, I knew I wanted a motherboard that at least paid lip service to good sound, assuming it didn’t blow my budget, which was sitting at around $1000, the most I could afford for this build.
OK, but if you’re reading an article like this for something resembling PC-building advice, you might be wondering how I even decided what kind of motherboard to go with, much less which features it should have. So let’s start at the beginning. What are the first decisions you need to make when you’re in similar shoes?
AMD or Intel? It’s not really a choice anymore
Since 1996, every PC I’ve built started with the same question: do I build an AMD machine or an Intel machine? That question affects both the CPU and motherboard, and in some cases the RAM.
There have been pros and cons to each approach over the years, although I’ve usually erred on the side of Intel. Those days are over. Unless you have very, very specific use cases that necessitate an Intel processor, get an AMD. It’s going to be cheaper, more energy-efficient, and depending on your tasks, probably faster at that.
We’re in a weird transition era with regard to AMD architecture, though. And if that sentence seems like tech gobble-gobble to you, you can think of PC architecture the way you’d think of, say, generations in Corvettes. Parts from one seventh-generation Corvette (2014–2019) likely fit others of that body style, but you can’t go sticking an air intake designed for a 2013-model C6 in a 2017 C7. Generations of computer hardware are akin to that.
In late 2020, AMD released its Zen 3 platform, for which new CPUs have continued to be developed and released as recently as late 2025. Zen 3 was superseded by Zen 4 in late 2022, though, which brought with it improvements in terms of PCIe (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express) implementation—meaning more bandwidth for graphics cards and NVMe drives. But the real advantage of Zen 4 over Zen 3, as far as I see it, is that Zen 4 motherboards will support new CPUs and GPUs for years to come, and Zen 3, while not exactly at end of life, doesn’t leave you much of an upgrade path going forward. And it won’t even unlock the full potential of the latest generation of graphics cards, nor will it run the fastest memory, although we’re deep into diminishing-returns territory on that front. Way deep.
Bottom line, the most compelling argument is this: buy a Zen 4 board now, and you can probably upgrade the CPU in five years if you want or need to. Buy a new Zen 3 board now, and you’ll likely still be using the same CPU when that computer dies. And you probably won’t have any compelling performance reasons to upgrade the graphics card far beyond what’s available now, either.
So, in short, Zen 3 is a solid choice if you want incredible bang for your buck and don’t care about upgradability, which is totally valid; Zen 4 is worth the extra outlay if you’d like to leave open the possibility of improving your system’s specifications one component at a time for years to come. Given that I tend to take a Ship of Theseus approach to my PCs, the latter is compelling.
If I had to buy a new solid-state drive and graphics card right now, though, you could have thrown all that reasoning right in the bin. I would have gone with a Zen 3 build, probably based on a Ryzen 5 5500 processor ($80-ish the week I write this) and an MSI B550 MPG Gaming Plus motherboard ($140-ish right this very now), plus whatever DDR4 RAM I could cobble together (maybe even used), and whatever Nvidia graphics card I could get for under $400 (again, probably used or refurbished).
And yeah, I could probably get a good deal on an AMD graphics card that would be a much better value, but I’m on the encoding team for a community video archival project, and the NVENC technology of Nvidia cards has proven to deliver better-looking, more stable, less glitchy video encodes that are much easier to decode, time and time again. If you’re not doing a lot of video encoding, especially with highly efficient codecs like HEVC or AV1, just get whatever AMD graphics card fits your budget. If you have corner-case needs like mine, though, you almost certainly know what graphics hardware you need.
Given that DDR4 memory isn’t selling for quite the insane rates that DDR5 is going for, had I gone Zen 3, I probably would have opted for 32GB of Crucial RAM for under $200 and a Sabrent 1TB NVMe drive for like $120, and I’d have a pretty decent system for right at $1000 by the time you factor in taxes and a power supply. It would be acceptable for gaming, great for music, decent for audio production, and all right for video production, and it would probably have served me just fine for five years or so.
But what if you can scavenge parts from an existing build?
Given that I managed to salvage my NVMe drive from my old Frankenstein machine, though, as well as my perfectly fine RTX 4060 graphics card, I had a little more budget left for a platform that will be expandable for quite some time. Granted, the RTX 4060 is a little long in the tooth by today’s standards, but given that it can run DOOM: The Dark Ages with every setting except for Path Tracing cranked, and especially given that it runs my forever game No Man’s Sky like a cheetah in heat with every graphics option set to Ultra, I’m OK with that.
But before we get to the specifics of what that budget-wiggle-room gave me, let’s talk about how I even went about knowing what processor would work with which motherboard and what kind of RAM it would support and all that hullabaloo. Because if you’ve never built a PC, you might either assume that all of these components just work together (they don’t), or that picking the parts for a coherent PC requires an advanced degree of some sort (it doesn’t).
What you want to do if you’re building a computer—whether now or sometime in the next few years when you can actually afford to build the sort of rig that would have been buildable in the halcyon bygone days of 2024 or thereabouts—is use something like PCPartPicker or, if you live in a place with a Micro Center nearby, that company’s Custom PC Builder.
The latter option might be better if you plan on buying in person, because Micro Center’s in-store-only CPU, motherboard, and sometimes memory bundles are among the best values in computerdom. Given that my closest Micro Center is a $150 drive away (that’s how us poors measure distance these days), any savings would have been eaten right up. Still, if you are near a Micro Center, you can use its Custom PC Builder to plan out all the parts, and its motherboard selector even has an option to filter for offerings with TosLink output. They’ll even put all the parts together for you and make sure it works for something like an extra $250.
PCPartPicker, on the other hand, lets you select your online retailers of choice, and its parametric parts picker is unparalleled. Start with one of its recommended configurations—which come with such appellations as “Entry Level AMD Gaming Build” and “Glorious AMD Gaming/Streaming Build”—and it’s easy to customize to your needs from there. The configuration will even tell you things such as “Warning! Some AMD B550 chipset motherboards may need a BIOS update prior to using Vermeer CPUs. Upgrading the BIOS may require a different CPU that is supported by older BIOS revisions.” But you’re alerted to any such potential snags during the process of picking your parts and putting together a complete system.
In the end, I went with a system that cost me $786.95 on the day I bought it (May 26) but climbed to $812.85 by the time I wrote this and remembered to screenshot my PCPartPicker system build (May 29). I don’t expect that number to go down within the next few months. In fact, I expect to see it go up by at least another $100 by the end of this summer, if not much, much more.
In case you can’t squint and read the text in the image, my final parts list broke down as follows:
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 7600X 4.7 GHz 6-Core Processor
- CPU Cooler: ID-COOLING FROZN A620 PRO SE 58 CFM CPU Cooler
- Motherboard: ASRock B650 Steel Legend WiFi ATX AM5 Motherboard
- Memory: Kingston FURY Beast 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR5-5200 CL40 Memory
- Case: Lian Li LANCOOL 216 RGB ATX Mid Tower Case (I actually opted for the non-RGB version at checkout because I’m not 12 and I value my darkness)
- Power Supply: MSI MAG A750GL PCIE5 750 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply
Could I have gotten away with anything less than 32GB of RAM if I were still running Windows as a daily driver? Not if I want to keep producing the SoundStage! Audiophile Podcast, I couldn’t. But as it turns out, 16GB of RAM on Linux is way more than enough, even when running an intensive audio-production program like Reaper. I might add another 16GB a year from now if the market stabilizes, though, just for the headroom. But it’s far from necessary the way it would be under Windows.
This all sounds so complicated. Isn’t PC-building some sort of arcane wizardry best left to the geekiest of geeks? What about the cost to put it together?
Listen to me. Seriously, heed these words.
You can build your own PC.
I promise you, unless you have manual-dexterity issues or visual impairments, you’ve got this. And yes, I wish you’d wait a year or so and see if this crazy hyperinflation settles down, but no matter when you’re ready to dive into your first build, there are a near-infinite number of resources at your disposal. YouTube is replete with step-by-step tutorials. The subreddits r/buildapc and r/pcmasterrace are amazing resources if you get stuck.
I need to revise my statement from above. This isn’t the second-worst time to build a computer; it’s the second-worst time to buy computer parts. It’s actually the best time to build a computer if you already have the parts, because you have so much free help right at your fingertips. Any question you might have has been asked and answered a gazillion times.
The thing to realize about all of these tutorials, though, is that they give you the broad concepts and some specifics, but putting together a PC is a dialectical process, so your order of operations might be slightly different from any of the YouTube videos you watch about the process or what your manuals might indicate. My motherboard manual, for example, says to install the CPU first (with diagrams for exactly how to line everything up and close the lid), then the CPU cooler, then the memory.
But the massive air cooler I bought to tame the toasty Ryzen 5 7600X actually overhangs the RAM slots on this and pretty much any motherboard, as you can see here. I’ve highlighted the cooler in yellow and the memory in blue.
What this meant is that I had to install the RAM before the cooler, and when/if I do add another 16GB of memory down the road, I’ll have to remove and then reinstall the cooler. Thankfully, I figured all that out while dry-fitting my components just to get a sense of how much space everything was going to take up and where my wires needed to go, so I didn’t have to redo my thermal paste on day one. But if you do have to re-apply your thermal paste—the thermally-but-not-electrically-conductive goop that makes sure the heat from your CPU is transferred to your cooler—that’s hardly a big deal. A $5 tube comes with more than enough paste for multiple applications.
In the end, it took me about an hour to put everything together for this build, and a lot of that was tied up in routing the power-connection cables. And I’m still not happy with it. Next time I go digging around in my case, I think I’m going to re-route the exhaust-fan cable highlighted in red to behind the heatsink cover it’s sitting on top of. But it doesn’t really matter too much, given that you can barely see inside my case even in my light-eating, pitch-black office.
I did promise to say something about quiet cooling, though, didn’t I? For the past few decades, I’ve mostly used water coolers and radiators for my CPUs in my custom builds. But a decent water cooler is going to run you $100 these days, whereas you can get an incredible air cooler for a frog’s hair over $25. Cost no object? I’m going water. But cost is very much an object these days.
I did have concerns that this would add to the noise of my system. But given that the incredible Lian Li LANCOOL 216 case I opted for comes with built-in fans and can be optimized for airflow instead of liquid cooling by rearranging the configuration just a little, I was hoping the noise wouldn’t be too bad.
In the end, not only do the case’s stock fans plus the FROZN A620 keep my CPU running way cooler than it’s optimized for (under incredibly heavy load, mine is hitting 86°C, whereas it was actually designed to operate at 95°C), but the whole system is so quiet that it only raises the noise floor at my seat a few feet away to 37.9dB even when the fans are screaming to dissipate the heat, which they almost never have to do. By comparison, my ceiling fan, set to level 2—the absolute bare minimum to survive in late May in Montgomery, AL—raises the noise floor to 46dB.
Geeky? Yes. But those are the sorts of things that matter in an audiophile-caliber system.
In the end, as I’ve said, I wish I could have waited a year to do this build. I’ve needed a new computer for quite some time, as my old Maingear Vybe from 2012 died last year—shortly after I tempted fate by typing the words, “My PC is long in the tooth, granted, but still runs like a striped ape, and its CPU is more powerful than many officially supported by Windows 11”—and I had to cobble together a replacement from spare parts added to my wife’s old dead Dell XPS 8920 (and it offended me more to use anything Dell-related than words can convey).
If I could have done this two years ago, or maybe waited another year (assuming market indicators are reliable), I could have built an absolute beast of a machine for this much money, especially given that I didn’t have to buy an NVMe or GPU.
But it is what it is. And what this little endeavor proves is that it’s still possible to value-engineer a really great machine that should last me through these dark times and beyond, with a few modifications here and there. And if I can do it, you can too. I just hope you don’t have to.
. . . Dennis Burger
dennisb@soundstagenetwork.com
