MAKING IT

The PC gamers sticking it to Big Hardware by making their own components

- Phil Iwaniuk

What separates us from the other gamers, aside from a historic proclivity for the color beige and an innate ability to discern one shadow quality setting from another, is that PC gamers build their own PCs. There’s nothing inherently wrong with gaming on a pre-assembled machine, of course, but doing it yourself is peak PC gaming. The modularity of our chosen platform means that building a rig up from scratch has been a crucial part of PC culture for as long as there have been games to motivate us to do so.

But there's building a PC, and then there's building a PC. When we buy individual components and then attach them to a motherboard, we're essentially indulging in a PCB-heavy version of Lego. There's a unified design language, a lexicon of connection standards and size formats, that lets us slot parts together with very little thought. Arguably, then, the people who actually build our self-built PCs are the designers who lay out the PCBs in the first place.

Which is, of course, a task orders of magnitude more complex than dropping a graphics card into a PCIe slot. The unfathomable complexity of how, say, a RAM module actually works means it's neither feasible nor financially viable to have a go at making your own. In other words, there's a big difference between thrifty endeavors that are absolutely fine to embark on, like fashioning your own suit for a wedding by simply tracing over the panels of an old one and cutting them out of an old pair of curtains, and a homemade graphics card.

SLOW AND FURIOUS

Electrical engineer Dylan Barrie knew this better than anyone. Such a project would be a fool's errand, a waste of time with very little chance of success. He decided to make one anyway. Barrie's entirely DIY FuryGPU is one of the great accomplishments in PC gaming.