It's extremely cost-prohibitive to build or buy a new PC right now, with US tariffs, inflation and the AI boom causing RAM, SSDs and graphics cards in particular to go up in price considerably. However, with the prospect of the situation not easing any time soon, is it better to bite the bullet and buy before things get even worse? Or is there light at the end of the tunnel?

That was the question posed by Digital Foundry supporter Andre Thompson on the recent DF Direct Q+A, and it's a thinker for sure. As I said on the show, the quote that comes to mind is that one about the best time for planting trees: the best time is years ago, but the second-best time is now.

When are you planning to upgrade your PC or build a new one?

If you've recently upgraded and your games are still running OK, then you're sitting pretty, but if you're not able to enjoy the games you're most interested in, then upgrading now still makes sense. After all, all indications we've had from the industry is that this is a "new normal" rather than a fad that'll die down in the short to medium term - including from SSD and DRAM manufacturer Lexar, who I recently had a chance to speak to during a tour of their Chinese factories.

Thankfully, there are some ways to at least dull the pain of upgrading your PC in 2026. Despite being replete with PC parts, Rich and I both spend a fair amount of time trawling sites like Facebook Marketplace and Ebay, where buying used can save you a huge amount versus new prices - especially if you're able to travel to pick up items. Even if you're not able to build the whole PC at once, picking up parts piecemeal as they appear can be a good strategy.

And if you prefer the certainty of buying new, Black Friday and other sales are still reasonably effective ways to cut costs, though using browser extensions like Keepa to make sure price drops are genuine is almost essential.

Maersk container PC sitting on a desk
This container PC? The motherboard, power supply and drives are all used parts. — Image: IGN

Beyond deal-finding, there is some reason to believe that the industry as a whole is coming up with ways to make existing hardware go further. For example, Nvidia's Neural Texture Compression is designed to maximise VRAM, letting less well-equipped graphics cards remain relevant for longer, while a Valve engineer is approaching the problem at the OS level to better prioritise games over background applications on Linux.

It's also possible to just opt out of playing the most demanding new releases right now, in favour of indie games or older titles that you may have missed at the time, optionally spruced up with mods that improve the experience or add in new content. I'm having a huge amount of fun playing the BattleTech Advanced 3062 mod of the 2018 BattleTech PC game, for example, which brings in a ludicrous amount of extra 'Mechs, maps, missions and weapons compared to the base game - and it still runs OK even on a fairly weak M1 Macbook Pro. You can go much further back than 2018 of course; building a machine that uses extremely old parts to target games from the early 2000s, for example, can be both fun and rewarding.

Ultimately, this is the strength of PC gaming - there's a huge variety of hardware and software available, and playing the newest games on the fastest GPUs is just one small part of the greater whole. Even if price rises are making that segment less enjoyable, there's plenty more to discover elsewhere.