By Ben Wilson
Publication Date: 2026-08-12 16:00:00
Mourning the concept of affordability in the custom PC-building scene isn’t a new trend; on the contrary, the eulogy for “Moore’s law” was read years ago, around when hardware like NVIDIA’s high-end GeForce RTX 40 Series graphics cards came with astronomical prices, and possibly even earlier than that.
Moore’s law is dead […] the ability for Moore’s Law to deliver twice the performance at the same cost, or at the same performance and half the cost, every year and a half is over. It’s completely over.
Jensen Huang, NVIDIA CEO, 2022
If you’ve never heard of the term — named after Intel co-founder Gary Moore — it’s a prediction (not really a law) of how computing power increases every few years by doubling transistor counts without a severe cost impact. Anyone who follows graphics card, RAM, or storage prices knows that dream is over.
On a more widely known subject, the demands of generative AI quickly became obvious as more models were widely adopted, and building them on local hardware is how that all gets started. Since then, our sister site, Tom’s Hardware, has watched GeForce RTX 50-series GPU prices spike by up to 39%. Sure, MSRP always felt like a suggestion rather than a rule with GPUs, but it’s getting worse.
Today’s GPU for the price of yesterday’s PC
As it stands, encouraging novices to build their first custom Windows rig is particularly…
