Having built 500+ PCs in my time I can say this with confidence: Building is fun and rewarding but ironing out those inevitable BIOS, CPU, memory kinks is unbearable

A photograph of a desktop PC next to a large monitor on a desk, with a keyboard and mouse.

Nick Evanson, Hardware writer

(Image credit: Nicholas Evanson)

This month I've been benchmarking: Endless benchmarking. Hours upon hours, run after run. All in the name of seeing exactly one game performs on a range of different PCs. And I'd do it all again in a flash, as I adore benchmarking. Yes, I am a little odd.

It's been a busy old month at Chateau Evanson, mostly down to the inordinate amount of time spent testing the performance of Dragon's Dogma 2 and how its quality settings affect things. That all started on my old primary PC, with a Core i7 9700K, but half way through, I did a full system upgrade to an Intel Z790 setup. New CPU, RAM, graphics card, coolers, SSDs, PSU. The lot, bar the case, which will eventually get replaced at some point as the cooler doesn't quite fit properly.