Enlarge (credit: NZXT)

It’s a weird time to build a PC. That’s partly because fewer people are doing it—sales for parts and prebuilt PCs are down across the industry, as people continue to make do with the stuff they bought early in the pandemic. And GPU prices, while closer to “normal” than they have been over the last two years, are still historically high.

But that doesn’t mean it’s a bad time to build a PC. Storage and memory are mostly cheap, and you can buy a lot of CPU power for not a lot of money (especially if what you’re used to is an older quad-core processor you picked up five or six years ago). Intel and AMD have also released new CPUs since our last system guide update in July, and Intel has finally jumped into the GPU business after years of false starts and delays.

It’s as good a time as any for a new version of our PC building guide, so we’ve put together four different sample builds focused on different budgets and use cases. You can buy the specific components we recommend and get a good, functional PC, or you can use them as starting points and make changes based on what you want and need.