5 PC hardware purchases I regret the most

Key findings

  • Spending too much money on the CPU when building a pure gaming PC is one of the worst mistakes you can make.
  • Purchasing a power supply that is too low will prevent you from being able to upgrade the parts you want in the future.
  • After just a few months, I had to regret the decision to go for suboptimal RAM and SSD.
  • Combining an entry-level graphics card with a powerful processor resulted in a subpar experience and higher costs overall.



There are a lot of decisions to be made when building a PC – what CPU and GPU to combine, which motherboard is best, how much RAM to buy, how many watts the power supply should be, and so on. And sometimes you can screw up one or more of these decisions, even if you've been building PCs for decades. I've had my share of bad PC hardware purchases, from components that just didn't offer good value for money to ones that were over the top.

To be clear, many of these products weren't bad per se, but they weren't the right choice for the PC I was building at the time. Whether due to budgetary constraints or bad impulses, I ended up buying them and regretting it.

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5 Ryzen 7 5700X

Investing in 8 cores was a mistake

Close-up of a gaming PC with RTX 3080 FE


The Ryzen 7 5700X is an excellent processor. Even now, after the Ryzen 9000 series has been released, the 5700X is more than sufficient for my needs. The problem is that it much more than enough for me in 2022 when I built my current PC. My main goal was gaming as always, and everything else I needed to do on the system like typing, browsing, and media streaming didn't really need 8 cores.

I could have invested the money I saved in a better CPU cooler, a better motherboard or a better case.

Since I had never used an 8-core processor in the past, I let my intrusive thoughts run wild and decided to go with that instead of making the right choice and choosing the Ryzen 5 5600X or the 5600. I could have invested the money I saved in a better CPU cooler, motherboard, or case. It's not that I didn't benefit at all from the 8-core 5700X, but I wouldn't have felt any disadvantages if I had gone with the 5600X instead.


Additionally, I built this system a month before the Ryzen 7000 CPUs were released because I was on a tight deadline, which made the additional investment in the 5700X a bad deal.

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4 Seasonic S12II 520W power supply

When it is not enough to be enough

When choosing a power supply, perhaps the most important consideration is whether it will be enough for the graphics card, closely followed by the CPU. When I was on a budget in 2017, I decided that a 500+ watt power supply was enough for my build, which had a Ryzen 5 1600 and a GTX 1050 Ti (more on that later). And although it enough In this build I did not take future upgrades into account.

I had to compromise and get a GTX 1660 Ti, but I had to forego all ray tracing features.


Since the GPU wasn't anything special, I started to feel the performance drop after just two years. I wanted to upgrade to an RTX 2060 Super, but the 520W power supply was inadequate to say the least. So I had to compromise and get a GTX 1660 Ti, which meant giving up any ray tracing features. The 1660 Ti was a phenomenal card for the price, but it still wasn't what I wanted. Not adding a buffer to the power supply's wattage turned out to be a fatal mistake that really ended up limiting my system.

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3 G.Skill Ripjaws V RAM

8GB of memory at 3,000 MT/s? Think again.

Two red G.Skill Ripjaws DDR4 RAM bars on a desk pad


In 2017, the amount of RAM needed for gaming wasn't even 16GB, let alone the 32GB that some people recommend today. So I was pretty confident buying a single 8GB stick of G.Skill DDR4 RAM with the intention of getting an identical stick later. The mistake was buying 3,000 MT/s RAM instead of 3,600 MT/s. The price difference wasn't that big, and I would have gained more gaming performance with the latter.

Kits rated at 3,600 MT/s were actually the sweet spot for gaming RAM and something I should have spent money on.

Since I had already purchased a DDR4-3000 DIMM, I absolutely had to buy an identical DIMM to pair with it. I could finally run dual-channel memory on my PC, but it would have been much better to spend a little more on faster RAM. These days, getting the fastest possible kit is less important with DDR5 RAM than it was at the height of DDR4 RAM. 3,600 MT/s kits were actually the sweet spot for gaming RAM and something I should have spent some money on.


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2 Samsung 860 EVO 250GB SSD

Buy what you can? I should have waited.

Samsung 860 EVO 250GB SSD in black installed on a white case

When I built my gaming PC in 2017, I didn't have the budget to afford an SSD, even a 250GB one, so I settled for a 1TB Seagate hard drive and hoped to upgrade to an SSD later. SSD prices weren't coming down at the pace I wanted, and when I ran out of patience a few years later, I just bought what I could get my hands on: a 250GB Samsung 860 EVO SATA SSD for about $60. The difference in system response and loading times while gaming was like night and day, but at what cost?

If I could have waited just a little longer, I could have skipped the expensive 250GB SSD altogether and maybe bought a 2TB SSD instead.


Just a few months later, NVMe SSD prices dropped into the realm of affordability and I purchased a 1TB Gen3 SSD for around $100. If I could have waited just a little longer, I could have skipped the expensive 250GB SSD altogether and maybe even bought a 2TB SSD instead. You can't always wait for the next best thing or for prices to bottom out, but in this case, I could have held onto my drive for a few more months until I could afford the equivalent storage capacity.

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1 GeForce GTX 1050 Ti

Combine a 1050 Ti with a Ryzen 5 1600

GTX 1660 Ti and GTX 1050 Ti graphics cards on a desk


Finally, we come to my worst PC hardware purchase of all time – the GTX 1050 Ti. While it was a perfectly acceptable entry-level GPU, it was far from ideal for the gaming PC I bought it for. Firstly, I had a Ryzen 5 1600 that could have easily handled a GTX 1070 Ti. Secondly, the fact that the cost of the graphics card was less than the cost of the CPU in a gaming PC should have set off alarm bells for me.

If I had purchased a mid-range GPU from the start, I would have saved some money and, more importantly, had a better gaming experience from the start.

However, my main focus was to stay within my budget. Even then, I should have saved elsewhere and upgraded the GPU selection to something more powerful. As I mentioned above, I had to get rid of the 1050 Ti in two years and got less than half of my original investment back by selling it. If I had bought a mid-range GPU from the start, I would have saved some money and, more importantly, had a better gaming experience from the start.


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Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose

I've probably made every mistake you can make when building a PC. Using an underpowered GPU, spending too much on the CPU, forgetting to install the I/O shield, installing the CPU cooler incorrectly, and having too many motherboard fan connectors are just a few of them. Some mistakes you can fix, others can haunt you for years. The only thing you can do afterward is learn from them and remember the reasons that led to the mistakes.

If you're finally looking to build a PC this year, take the time to learn the basics, set your budget, and assemble the PC. There are many overkill components to avoid, and don't forget the things you should do after building your PC. Happy building!

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