After 16 years of console use, I built my first gaming PC myself

Building a gaming PC seems like rocket science to many inexperienced people. The components are expensive, you’re afraid of making a mistake during construction and once you look at the necessary wiring, your head switches off. After 16 years on the console, I finally took the plunge and built my own gaming PC – without any PC knowledge: This is how it went.

Who is writing here? My name is Christos and I write on MeinMMO mainly about various games such as Destiny 2, Elden Ring and Fortnite. As far as hardware knowledge goes, I have often taken my consoles and controllers apart, repaired them and even cleaned them thoroughly. Experience in PC construction, on the other hand, is almost non-existent, so the project was an exciting affair for me. I wanted to test myself and see if a complete tech noob like me could build his dream PC.

Why the sudden change? 16 years on the console is a long time, but if you really want to play professionally, you should consider switching to the PC. For my part, I had many reasons:

Now I had the choice, either I slaughter my piggy bank and treat myself to a really powerful gaming PC or spend a few more years getting angry about consoles: My decision was the first.

The first step has been taken, but as a complete tech noob, how do you start building your gaming PC? If you don’t know anything about the matter, then you have to get information and a lot of it.

If you don’t know, you should stay away

Knowledge is essential in every thing you do. When it comes to building a gaming PC, I can give you some advice: If you don’t feel like finding out more in advance, buy a ready-made PC, otherwise it will be frustrating and expensive.

I sat for a whole month learning the knowledge about PCs. Through countless forum entries, videos on YouTube and questions from our tech expert Benedikt Schlotmann, I collected everything I needed to build the PC.

This was primarily about:

Once you have acquired the necessary background knowledge, you are already half the battle. Now you have to buy the components and that is where the second problem comes.

Strong hardware is extremely expensive and rare

When buying my components, I obviously didn’t want to make the most expensive offer, so I used sites like idealo.de or geizhals.de to get the cheapest prices. The prices fluctuate depending on the season and of course I got the worst one – my prices were not at the highest limit, but were close to the limit.

But even if you have the money, you have to be lucky to find a seller who will deliver the hardware to you on time. Many providers had the necessary hardware at good prices, but were only able to impress with a delivery time of 6 months, which was unfavorable in my case. So you have to decide either on expensive hardware with a short delivery time or cheap hardware but a long delivery time.

However, I have to say one thing: it was fun to get a new package of components delivered every day and check it for integrity.

Now comes the most exciting part – the assembly.

An indescribable experience that has to be experienced to be believed

List of all the components I installed:

Building my PC was really exciting and I enjoyed every minute of it, even though I encountered a lot of problems. First of all, be sure to ground yourself when you are touching sensitive components.

As I was about to put my AMD Ryzen 7800X3D into the socket, I grounded myself in front of it and got a shock from my heater. You can probably imagine how shocked I was. If I hadn’t done that, there would have been a high risk that my CPU would have suffered damage.

But apart from that everything went smoothly and according to plan. It felt like you were a real expert at what you were doing, even though you didn’t even know if the box would start or burst into flames.

The entire assembly took me up to 12 hours over two days, and only for one reason – my huge CPU fan. This was the only annoying problem that cost me many hours, and I’ll show you why:

My fan was the Noctua NH-D15 G2 – a monster that seems gigantic compared to other CPU fans. The graphics card I had was the ASUS TUF RTX 4090, also a huge piece.

There wouldn’t be any problems because I took the case from Hyte, the Y70. In theory there was enough space, but then not. The CPU cooler was screwed on and now the graphics card had to go in, but the cooler took up so much space that I couldn’t insert the graphics card without damaging it. It can only be installed vertically in the housing.

So you unscrewed the cooler, inserted the graphics card and then the cooler again without the fan, but then the next problem: I didn’t have enough space on the side of the graphics card to attach the fan brackets to the cooler – I was desperate.

I was about to give up, but then I thought I’d try something unconventional. I tried using a wire to tension the brackets towards the GPU from a distance. That sounded really ridiculous and you don’t want to know how long it took, but it actually worked.

Sure, my fingers were scraped, I was bleeding, and some of the heatsink fins were slightly bent (I was even able to bend them back), but it still worked. At this point I advise you to send your cooler back and buy one that actually fits in – I, on the other hand, really wanted this massive cooler, so I endured the torture.

Last but not least, I played electrician and wired up my PC. Don’t expect perfect cable management, but I still did well, even though cabling is an art in itself. If you make a mistake and only plug in the cables loosely, you risk a fire, so be conscientious.

When everything was ready, I went to the TV with my PC and connected it. The moment of truth, either he turns on, shows no reaction or sparks. But it started. I was really happy like a little child who built his first block tower.

It’s been almost a month now, but how is the PC doing and what is my opinion on the change? You can find that in my conclusion.

Conclusion: Many pros, but also some cons

The PC build was a complete success. I can now play games at the highest graphics settings and also have a very quiet system. If something is broken, I simply replace components, which is not possible with a console. Last but not least, I’m no longer paying annoying online subscriptions for a feature that should be free for anyone who pays their ISP.

But there are also some cons and one of them is the price. In my case, I tried to buy the best components for my purposes and ended up with a price of +3,500 €. Depending on the components, you can also get by with up to €1,000 – €2,000. But if you want to push the limits, you have to pay a lot.

Another point is adapting your PC. Sure, you assembled the PC, but if you use PMW, you can adjust the speed of your fans so that they run even quieter. You can undervolt your graphics card so that it doesn’t overheat so quickly and is protected, and the same applies to the CPU. The reason this speaks against it is the additional effort. You don’t have to do all of this with a console.

Of course, the adjustment is purely optional, but if you want a perfectly coordinated system, you have to inform yourself again in order to find harmony in its components so that the respective system operates according to your wishes.

For my part, I will only play on PC from now on and look forward to the next few years in which I improve my setup. Do you still remember the moment when you put together your first PC setup? Feel free to write your opinion in the comments!