I built my first gaming PC for Baldur’s Gate 3, and it changed my life

Our electronics editor on finding his passion. [Reviewed.com Logo]( [Gaming set-up] Photo by Jonathan Hilburg / Reviewed I built my first gaming PC for Baldur’s Gate 3, and it changed my life Welcome back to Techtober. This month, our tech team is making the journey directly to your inbox to share their best tech takes and tales. Today's newsletter is from [Jonathan Hilburg]( our electronics editor with a specialty in all things gaming. Happy reading. — Sara Beth Bolin, Newsletter Writer Think back to October of 2020. COVID had forced a major shift in how Americans work, and many of us found ourselves working out of bedrooms with half-formed tech setups and unsure when (if ever) we might return to the office. It was also the month game developer Larian released the early access build of Baldur’s Gate 3. I’ve always been a PC gamer, from playing DOS games on the family computer in the living room to pining over Nvidia’s GeForce 8800 GTX graphics card in high school so that I could run Crysis and Bioshock. After grad school, I stuck to laptops out of a space—and budget—necessity. But when Larian revealed it was working on a sprawling RPG game that promised to be the most faithful translation of fifth edition Dungeons and Dragons ever, I put down $60 for early access (basically a demo of the game’s unfinished first act) and set to work building my first PC from scratch. That in-progress version of Baldur’s Gate 3 hit Steam on October 6, 2020, right in the middle of the release of Nvidia’s RTX 3000-series of graphics cards and about two weeks before GPU prices skyrocketed. The next two years would be all about shortages and price gouging as supply chain issues, scalping, and cryptocurrency mining took cards out of the hands of consumers. But all I wanted to do was put together a capable gaming PC for $500, and I lucked out by buying at just the right time. My first gaming PC wasn’t impressive by any means—a [Ryzen 5 3600]( CPU, EVGA-branded Nvidia 1650 Super, and only 512GB of storage in a massive [NZXT H510]( case—but it ran Baldur’s Gate 3 just fine. More importantly, it started me on the “upgrade treadmill” any PC builder is all too familiar with and I began paying keen attention to the ins and outs of the industry. May we all find something to ignite our tech passion. Jonathan Hilburg Electronics Editor Recommendations are independently chosen by Reviewed's editors. Purchases you make through our links may earn us a commission. [Share with a friend]( [Subscribe]( [Visit us on Facebook!]( [Visit us on Instagram!]( [Visit us on Twitter!]( [Visit us on YouTube!]( [Visit us on Pinterest!]( [Reviewed Logomark]Reviewed is part of the USA Today network Reviewed 19 Brookline St Cambridge, MA 02139-4103 Copyright © 2023 Reviewed, All rights reserved. Is this email not displaying correctly? [View it in your browser](. [Update your email preferences]( or [unsubscribe from this list](