Related: AI Coding Assistants: What They Actually Change for a Development Team
This is satire. It is a joke about the price of graphics cards. Please do not sell any part of yourself to anyone for any reason, and particularly not for a marginal uplift in ray-traced reflections. If you genuinely cannot afford a computer, the answer is at the bottom, and it does not involve surgery.
Building a gaming PC in 2026 has reached the point where the spreadsheet stops being a spreadsheet and starts being a moral document. You open a parts picker with a budget. You close it four hours later having quietly agreed to spend nineteen percent more than you told anyone, and having added a fan you cannot justify.
At some point in that process, everyone has the same thought. What do I actually have that is worth money.
Here is the ranking, from worst value to best.
10. Your appendix
Medically famous for doing nothing. Commercially, priced accordingly.
An appendix will get you one 120mm case fan. Not an RGB one. A plain black one with a sticker on the hub that says it moves 62 cubic feet per minute, which you will never verify.
You will then discover the case only has two fan headers and both are used. You now need a fan hub. The hub costs more than the fan. You are already behind.
9. Your tonsils
You had these removed at eleven and nobody consulted you about the resale market. A missed opportunity that continues to sting.
Estimated value: one metre of braided cable extensions in a colour that does not match your motherboard, which you will buy anyway because the correct colour is out of stock until March.
8. Your gallbladder
A genuine step up. The gallbladder gets you into entry level peripherals.
Specifically, it gets you a mechanical keyboard with switches you will describe as "thocky" to people who did not ask, and will replace in eight months because you read one forum post about a different switch that is apparently better.
7. Bone marrow
Renewable, which makes this the subscription model of the list.
Funds one 1TB NVMe drive. This sounds like a lot until you install three modern games and a launcher that insists on keeping a second copy of everything for reasons it declines to explain. You will be at 94 percent capacity within a fortnight and you will begin the ancient ritual of deciding which game you are least likely to open again.
6. A rib
You have twenty four. Losing one is, by the standards of this article, a rounding error.
A rib buys 32GB of DDR5. Not the fast kit. The kit that the reviews call "perfectly adequate," a phrase that will haunt you every time you open Chrome and a game at the same time.
5. Your spleen
Filters blood. Also, apparently, filters your dignity, because this is the point in the list where the numbers start getting serious and you stop laughing.
The spleen covers a decent power supply. A real one, with a warranty measured in double digit years, from a brand whose name you recognise. This is the single most boring purchase in the entire build and the only one that can set your house on fire, so do not skimp here. Even in a satirical article. Especially in a satirical article.
4. Your left lung
You have two and only really need one for sitting down, which is the primary activity this entire purchase enables.
A lung gets you a motherboard with the chipset you actually want, rather than the one two tiers down that you were going to convince yourself was fine. You know the one. It has one M.2 slot and the VRM heatsink is a sticker.
Downside: reduced lung capacity makes it harder to sigh audibly when your framerate drops, and sighing audibly is a core part of the hobby.
3. Your other lung
Ill advised. Also still not enough for the graphics card.
Both lungs together get you a very good CPU and a cooler large enough that the instructions contain the phrase "check motherboard clearance," which you will not do, and which will cost you an afternoon and a small amount of your first RAM stick's dignity.
2. A kidney
The classic. The blue chip. The organ that launched a thousand jokes exactly like this one.
A kidney gets you the graphics card. Not the flagship. The one below the flagship, which reviewers describe as "the sensible choice" in a tone of voice that makes it clear they bought the flagship.
You will then spend six weeks reading benchmark charts for the card you did not buy, at resolutions you do not own a monitor for, in games you do not play. This is normal. This is the hobby.
1. Your remaining kidney
Gets you the flagship.
Also gets you dialysis three times a week, which as it happens is an excellent opportunity to catch up on your Steam backlog, so arguably this one pays for itself. You will finally start Disco Elysium. You will get four hours in. You will stop.
The parts of the build nobody sells an organ for
Notice what is missing from this list. Every single thing that actually determines whether you enjoy using the computer.
- A good monitor. You stare directly at this for every second of use. People will spend 1,200 on a graphics card and then send its output to a panel they got free with a desk.
- A chair. Your spine is load bearing for this entire hobby and it does not have a replacement cycle.
- A desk at the right height. Free to get right. Costs your wrists to get wrong.
- Enough case airflow. The tempered glass front panel looks tremendous and is, thermally speaking, a wall.
The actual advice
Fine. Here it is, and it is boring, which is how you know it is real.
- Buy last generation, six months late. The performance gap between this year's card and last year's is almost always smaller than the price gap. You are paying a large premium for a number that only matters in a chart.
- Buy used for the parts that do not wear out. Cases, fans, and monitors are fine second hand. Be more careful with storage and power supplies, which do wear.
- Spend the money on the monitor. Genuinely. A mid-range card on a good screen beats a flagship on a bad one, every time, and it is not close.
- Cap your framerate. Most of the heat, noise and power draw in a modern PC is spent rendering frames beyond what your monitor can display or your eyes can notice.
- Wait for the game to be good. Half the hardware pressure in this hobby comes from wanting to play something on release day. Six months later it runs better, costs less and has fewer bugs. Your hardware got faster by doing nothing.
None of that requires surgery. All of it requires patience, which is admittedly the one component that has never been in stock.
Apex Logic builds software, not gaming PCs. If you would like something built that does not involve a graphics card, we are easier to talk to than a parts picker.
Comments