6 worst pieces of advice PC enthusiasts love to dish out

If you’re in the middle of researching a new PC build, you will inevitably spend a lot of time on Reddit, hunting for first-person experience of various PC components and PC building in general. Reddit and similar platforms are full of enthusiasts who are willing to help out a fellow builder with reasonable advice.

However, you will also find people who love to force misinformation on new and inexperienced builders. It can be tough to identify these ill-advised recommendations, so I’ve put together 6 of the worst pieces of advice you’ll probably hear online. Some of these have pieces of truth in them; still, they’re often exaggerated to the point of being elitist or plain dumb.

6

Buy at least a 1200W PSU for high-end builds

How many watts do you want? – Yes

A common misconception about the power supply requirements of a high-end gaming PC is that you should always go for an overkill PSU. Despite most gamers buying mid-range CPUs and GPUs, they find people online recommending them a 1200W or 1600W power supply for “safety” or “future-proofing”. Keeping one’s expensive components safe and accounting for future upgrades is sensible, but you rarely need such overkill PSUs to accomplish that.

Even today, a $1,500 gaming PC with, say, an RTX 4070 Ti Super or RTX 5070 Ti, and a Ryzen 7 7700 does not need anything more than a quality 850W PSU. For high-end PCs with an RTX 4090 and Core i9-14900K, you’re perfectly fine with a 1000W unit. With such a configuration, you’re unlikely to upgrade your GPU or CPU any time soon, but even accounting for future upgrades does not warrant going higher than a 1200W PSU. Enthusiasts claiming that kind of wattage as a bare minimum is simply crazy.

We’re seeing GPUs climb the TDP charts rapidly, and 600W+ GPUs will likely arrive in the next generation, but more often than not, you don’t need overspecced power supplies for your PC. Instead of taking people on their word, find the power consumption of your build, and add some buffer for a future GPU upgrade. You can then choose the best PSU for your PC yourself.

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5

Avoid air coolers like the plague

Advice best left in the past

The users recommending AIO liquid coolers to everyone are probably running power-hungry CPUs like Core i7s, Core i9s, or Ryzen 9s. Unless you’re planning to pick up one of these chips, you’ll have no problems cooling your CPU with a decent aftermarket air cooler. Over the years, air coolers have grown surprisingly powerful and silent. Most of them are relatively compact, and the best air coolers cost much less than 360mm AIOs.

For instance, the Thermalright Phantom Spirit 120 is a $35 dual-tower air cooler that can easily cool up to 200W of CPU load. The most commonly used CPUs in gaming builds will be small fry for this fantastic air cooler. And if you really want something more high-end, you can check out Noctua’s NH-D15, a phenomenal option that costs over $100. It’s the same as many AIOs, but you don’t need to deal with potential leakage, failure, or poor performance that many AIOs struggle with.

Thermalright Phantom Spirit 120 SE

Thermalright’s Phantom Spirit 120 SE is a bigger version of its acclaimed Peerless Assassin 120. It performs even better, costs the same, and can go head-to-head with many liquid AIO coolers.

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4

The pricier the motherboard, the better it is

You don’t need to overspend on the motherboard

Out of all the components that you shouldn’t waste money on, the motherboard is the one you need to be most wary of. In a market where you can find motherboards breaching the $1,500 barrier, there are way too many chances of blowing your PC budget on something that doesn’t matter too much to your PC’s performance. Buying a $1000, $700, $500, or even $300 motherboard is easily avoidable for the vast majority of gamers.

The motherboard is an important component of your build, no doubt, since it determines the quality of power delivery to your CPU, the features you can expect, and your expansion options in the future. However, the best motherboard for your PC, keeping everything in mind, doesn’t need to be expensive. These days, you don’t need to spend more than around $200 on a B650 or Z860 motherboard to get DDR5 support, multiple M.2 slots (including Gen5), integrated Wi-Fi, and pre-installed heatsinks. You can even pick a white variant in that budget.

Gaming performance doesn’t really scale as you go from mid-range to high-end motherboards. Beyond a point, the motherboard becomes a money sink, eating up the budget that could be better used for a more powerful GPU or CPU. You only need a handful of features for any mid-range or even high-end gaming PC, and they’re easily available on motherboards priced around $200 and less.

Gigabyte B650 Aorus Elite AX ICE

The Gigabyte B650 Aorus Elite AX ICE offers a premium aesthetic and great features at an affordable price. It’s one of the best overall options for mid-range AM5 gaming PCs.

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3

DDR4 is dead

“What do we say to the god of death?”

DDR5 motherboards and RAM have gotten significantly cheaper compared to when they first came out, and the platform cost is no longer prohibitive. That said, someone targeting a super-budget build or attempting to build a PS5 Pro killer PC would still love to go DDR4 over DDR5. And it’s not just the slightly cheaper DDR4 RAM and motherboards that factor into this decision; DDR4 CPUs, such as AMD’s AM4 chips, are also much more affordable compared to their AM5 processors.

For users who want to make every dollar count, DDR4 still offers a great option to build a powerful gaming PC on the cheap. DDR4 RAM isn’t much slower compared to DDR5 RAM in gaming, and even AM4 CPUs like the Ryzen 5 5600 won’t perform much differently than, say, the Ryzen 5 7600 on a budget build (considering the GPU won’t be able to make the differences in the CPUs matter much).

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2

AMD’s CPU supremacy is just marketing

Fans of userbenchmark?

Surprisingly, a lot of PC users like to believe that the hype around AMD’s CPUs over the last few years is “fake”, generated by paid YouTubers and uninformed users. Those peddling this laughable misinformation might not be seen in huge numbers, but the damage they can do is far-reaching. They can convince new PC builders into buying supposedly “better” Intel CPUs, when in reality, AMD has been beating Intel in pretty much every segment.

The comments made by such users resemble the standard slop seen on the userbenchmark website, often containing blatant lies and outdated information about AMD CPUs. The worst part is that they aren’t even “coping”, they truly believe the stuff they say online. Where we see Intel trailing AMD in gaming as well as most productivity benchmarks, offering worse efficiency, and failing to provide any sort of platform longevity, Intel fanboys are still in their fantasy world.

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1

Nvidia GPUs are the best, no questions asked

What years of Nvidia hangover do to a man

Nvidia is the clear leader in the consumer GPU space, boasting a 90% market share compared to AMD’s nearly 10%, and Intel’s near-zero. However, Nvidia GPUs are hardly “the best” for every consumer anymore. Even the high-end GPUs in the Blackwell lineup offer a meager performance uplift over their previous-gen counterparts. More importantly, however, the competition has improved a lot over the years, offering objectively better options in many segments.

Those still blindly believing in Nvidia’s supremacy have outdated knowledge about AMD GPUs surrounding performance, drivers, temperatures, and features. Alternatively, they believe that Nvidia’s better marketing must mean that their GPUs are inherently better than the competition in every way. In contrast, we’ve been seeing AMD offer better performance per dollar, more VRAM, and, with RDNA 4, even competitive ray tracing and upscaling performance.

Budget and mid-range gamers rarely get good value from Nvidia cards; Intel’s Battlemage and AMD’s RX 9000 GPUs are currently the best options in the budget and mid-range segments, respectively. Not every gamer considers ray tracing a must-have, which might sound like heresy to Nvidia fans. As PC users, we should not go to bat for billion-dollar companies, spreading misinformation about their products simply due to personal bias. Opinions should instead be informed by third-party benchmarks and price-to-performance alone.

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Bad advice will always exist in the PC hardware space

As long as people keep fanboying for their favorite company, and believing in false performance facts, new PC builders will have to painstakingly separate bad hardware advice from good. While it may seem tempting to pick up a few quick build tips on Reddit, it’s better to cross-check your findings by consuming reviews and build advice from reputable YouTube creators. You will then be well-poised to form your own opinions about the PC hardware industry, and your upcoming build.