After weeks of research, comparisons, and endless YouTube videos, we finally did it - our first custom-built gaming PC is up and running at home!
A Dad’s Day Out
The best part of this whole project wasn’t the PC. It was the shopping trip.
I took my two sons, Rithun (8) and Viyan (4) with me to SP Road, just the three of us, no mom, no rules. A proper boy’s day out.
Two excited kids walking down a street lined with shops stacked floor to ceiling with graphics cards and PC cabinets is basically Disneyland for an 8-year-old and pure chaos for a dad trying to negotiate prices 😄
So, Why a PC?
The idea was simple. My sons wanted a machine for gaming and school work, and my wife, a civil and structural engineer needed something powerful for her design tools.
And I wanted an excuse to buy expensive computer parts and call it for the family
The Rabbit Hole
I started with a budget of ₹1.5 lakh. I ended up spending days comparing processors, GPUs, motherboards, and coolers like it was a part-time job.
My considerations:
- AMD vs Intel - the Ryzen 7 9800X3D won easily. Its 3D V-Cache makes it one of the best gaming CPUs out there, and the AM5 socket gives me a clear upgrade path for years.
- Graphics card - the RTX 5060 hit the sweet spot between price and performance for 1440p gaming.
- Air vs liquid cooling - I went with an AIO liquid cooler for better thermals and a cleaner look.
And then, as every PC builder in history has experienced: 16GB of RAM quietly became 32GB. The 240mm cooler became a 360mm. And the budget “gently” drifted from ₹1.5L to ₹2L.
If you’ve built a PC before, you already know this story. If you haven’t - trust me, it happens to everyone.
What I Ended Up Buying
We bought everything on 4th July 2026 from Ankit Infotech on SP Road, Bangalore. Here’s what went into the build:
| Component | Part | Price (₹) |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D | 40,000 |
| Cooler | Arctic Liquid Freezer III Pro 360 ARGB | 9,500 |
| Motherboard | MSI B850 Tomahawk Max WiFi | 19,958 |
| RAM | Corsair Vengeance 32GB (2x16) DDR5 6000MHz | 35,593 |
| GPU | MSI RTX 5060 8GB Gaming OC | 33,051 |
| PSU | MSI MAG A750GL PCIE5 (Fully Modular) | 7,076 |
| Storage | WD Black SN7100 1TB NVMe SSD | 15,254 |
| Case | Corsair 3500X ARGB Mid Tower | 7,364 |
| OS | Windows 11 Pro (original license) | 5,900 |
Total damage: about ₹2,03,900 including GST and the Windows license.
Notably absent from this table: Steam game purchases. Those numbers exist. I know them. I am not brave enough to put them here.
The build in all its RGB glory
Assembling It (With Two Very Curious Supervisors)
I could have paid the shop to assemble the parts. Instead, I built it myself at home with Rithun and Viyan sitting right next to me the entire time, asking questions about literally every single part.
Why is it called a motherboard?
What happens if you touch that?
Can I hold the Processor?
No, Viyan. Please never hold the Processor.
Rithun’s question stumped me the most though: If there’s a motherboard, where’s the father board?
I didn’t have an answer on the spot, but I’ve been thinking about it since, and honestly - it has to be the graphics card. It doesn’t really do anything for the system to just function; the whole PC runs fine without it. It only shows up when it’s time to play. But somehow it’s the one part the entire world can’t stop talking about, while the motherboard quietly does all the actual work in the background and gets none of the credit. Checks out.
The whole experience of building with 2 curious kids was adorable and terrifying - especially the part where I had to mount the CPU cooler and thread a dozen tiny front-panel cables while two kids leaned in for a closer look.
And of course, it didn’t go perfectly. The liquid cooler’s LED refused to light up, and the CPU temperature climbed to a very alarming 90°C. I was convinced tightening the screws any further would crack the processor, so I chickened out.
Back to the shop, this time I went alone. The technician grabbed a screwdriver and just… force-tightened the exact same screws I’d been too scared to touch. That was it - LED came on, temps dropped below 50°C, problem solved in about 30 seconds.
Lesson learned: those cooler screws need way more muscle than my anxious dad-brain was willing to apply.
Was It Worth It?
Watching my kids’ faces light up on their first game on this machine made every hour of research worth it.
Here’s the funny part though: I don’t even like playing video games. Ten minutes into any game and my brain literally starts to hurt. I’ve always been a physical, outdoor-games person - give me a football or a running track over a controller any day.
I genuinely admire the design and the hardware engineering that goes into gaming - the thermals, the RGB, how every part clicks together - but actually playing on this machine? Not for me. I built it, I love it, and I’ll probably never play on it. 😄
That said, this machine might still end up serving me too - maybe someday I’ll extend it with a more powerful graphics card and run local LLMs on it for my own testing and tinkering. The kids get their games, and dad gets his AI playground. Fair deal.
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