3 components you can skip when building your PC (but you shouldn’t)

Let’s say you’re on the hunt for the coolest pixel-pushing hardware for your next PC when you realize that you’ve run out of budget. As it turns out, you don’t really need a full repertoire of components for a functional PC – if you’re willing to deal with hours of anguish, hair-pulling, and inconvenience just to satisfy your tinkering fantasies, then read on! Here’s a list of essential PC components that, despite fulfilling essential roles, can be removed from your upcoming build.

3

Case

Your PC will look like a rat’s nest, though

The pièce de résistance of every PC-building artist, your case has a lot of practical uses besides adding to the aesthetics of your computing war-machine. In addition to regulating the airflow of your system, it can protect the fragile internals from accidental spillage. A good-quality case can also make cable management a breeze and, once you arm it with some dust filters, can serve as a solid deterrence against dust, grime, and pet hair.

But if you’re unable to find a proper cabinet for your weirdly-shaped X99 motherboard and aren’t willing to become a practitioner of dremeling, you could just ditch the case entirely. As someone who usually has at least one PC lying in its caseless glory inside his nerd cave, this setup could work – so long as you’re willing to be extra careful around your defenseless system.

2

Discrete graphics card

A high-end GPU? In this economy?

The graphics card may be the most mouth-watering component in the PC landscape, but the over-inflated prices of modern GPUs are anything but appetizing. That’s before you include the sky-high wattage and massive size of discrete GPUs. So, if your wallet can’t afford a dedicated graphics card yet, you can make do without it… assuming your processor has an iGPU built into it.

Contrary to what you may believe, integrated graphics chips have become quite formidable these days. So long as you’re on one of the newer iGPU-laden processors, you can even have a solid gaming experience with just your CPU. Factor in some optimized settings and Lossless Scaling hijinks, and you can essentially run most modern titles at playable FPS on modest iGPUs.

1

Storage drives

SSDs and HDDs, begone!

As the component responsible for storing the essential OS files, drivers, and personal documents, you might wonder if you can run a functioning PC without your SSD/HDD. Thanks to the ingenuity of live boot environments hosted on PXE servers, it’s entirely possible to perform your everyday workloads on a system without slotting a single storage drive into your system.

Heck, you can take this project to the next level by loading an entire distribution inside RAM. Unfortunately, such a setup has a major dealbreaking issue – you won’t be able to save any changes to your distro without configuring persistent storage on an additional drive. But if you’re looking for a full-on privacy-centric computing setup, running an OS on the memory might not be such a bad idea.

Related

I ran an operating system from RAM – here’s how it went

You may run out of memory if you try this on a weaker system…

Realistically, should you skip these components in your next build?

Since this article is meant to serve as a mere thought experiment, I’d say probably not. With many budget-friendly cabinets available on the market, there’s no reason to make your cherished gaming system vulnerable to accidents. Likewise, NVMe SSDs, especially the ones featuring the outdated PCIe Gen 3 and Gen 4 standards, are fairly affordable. Unless you’re working with classified data, there’s not much of a reason to set up persistent storage. Better yet, you can skip the shenanigans of a live boot environment altogether by running the OS on the SSD like a normal user.

All that said, if you’re running out of budget, it’s not such a terrible idea to skimp out on the graphics card. Just make sure your processor does have an iGPU. Otherwise, you might be left with a largely useless piece of hardware that has no means of providing a display output.