I Got a New PC Ready for 2026

As 2026 rolls around, I decided to replace the main PC I use at home. This is the record of that.

Background#

My main PC at home was one I got about 7 years ago, a discarded machine handed down to me from my university lab. Specs:

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*   CPU: Core i7-3930K (Sandy Bridge-E / 6 cores, 12 threads)
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*   RAM: 64GB (DDR3)
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*   GPU: GeForce GTX 1060 6GB
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*   Storage: SATA SSD 1TB + HDD 2TB

I’d kept it limping along by adding RAM and a video card, but by 2025 it had become a museum piece.

Even Gemini (the AI) got nasty about it, calling it things like “a legendary veteran from 15 years ago” and “Sandy Bridge geezer.”

Not being able to play the latest games is fine. What I can’t take is feeling the sluggishness while doing plain old web browsing. So I’d been thinking it was about time to buy a new PC.

And then, right at that moment, RAM prices went absolutely insane.

Is this hell?

The question is whether this RAM surge is a temporary panic-buying spike or something that will last.

From what I could find, and from what I got out of asking Gemini, this is not a temporary problem. (Prices may be overheated right now, sure, but) RAM is not going back to normal for the next few years.

The invisible hand should eventually fix the memory shortage, but building and bringing online new semiconductor fabs takes years. It won’t get better until then, at the very least.

And even once things cool down in a few years, we’ll probably end up accepting a price 1.5 to 2 times the old one as the “new normal.”

So, can my current PC hold out a few more years? Pretty doubtful.

So I reluctantly decided to buy a new PC, even though the timing was pretty lousy.

That was about 2 weeks ago.

Research#

First, hunting for candidates.

Prebuilt#

I hadn’t considered it at all, but looking back, buying a prebuilt machine may have actually been an option. If I’d gone that route, I might have gone for a roughly 500,000 yen (about $3,200) PC that can run local LLMs, since why not.

Full DIY Build#

This is the option with the most romance, but I’m not that interested in the act of assembling a PC itself. I had no desire to sacrifice my New Year holidays to sorting out hardware compatibility issues and dead-on-arrival parts.

Besides, going this way means taking the full brunt of the RAM price surge. No thanks.

BTO#

The PC from two generations ago was assembled for me through BTO (build-to-order) at Tsukumo Denki (a Japanese PC parts and BTO chain). I love Tsukumo-tan, so I thought about going with Tsukumo again, but prices were already up because of the RAM surge, and deliveries were delayed.

↑Tsukumo-tan, photographed in 2018. So cute.

Other BTO services were in the same boat. There was a tempting offer or two, like letting you pick relatively cheap RAM only if you order through BTO, but even that didn’t strike me as good value.

Result#

So I decided to look for a used PC with decent specs and in good condition.

Purchase, Part 1#

I checked Mercari (a Japanese flea market app), the black market of the modern age, and found a PC that had been listed 6 months earlier and was still unsold. It was probably expensive for its time, but with RAM now up 4x, the price was low enough that I’d probably break even even if I parted it out.

CPU: Ryzen 7 7800X3D (8C/16T / with 3D V-Cache)
GPU: GeForce RTX 4070 Super 12GB
RAM: 32GB (DDR5)
Price: about 200,000 yen (about $1,300)

So I steeled myself and hit buy.

It was supposed to ship “within 1-2 days of purchase,” but the seller was away on a trip until Christmas, so it would take a little while to ship. Luckily, it was an area I’d been to myself, so I recommended some good ramen places and settled in to wait all warm and fuzzy. Well, a belated Christmas present, I figured, works out just fine.

…Or so I thought, but even after Christmas passed, it still didn’t ship. Worse, after the message “I’ll be back today and prepare the shipment,” the seller stopped replying to the transaction messages altogether.

Maybe they got into an accident. But nine times out of ten, they probably just noticed the RAM prices way too late and regretted selling at this price.

Purchase, Part 2#

Ten days after the purchase, it was December 30. At this rate, I wouldn’t be able to welcome the new year with a new PC. Honestly, I was pretty pissed.

But I couldn’t find a PC on Mercari that matched what I wanted. All the newer listings were absurdly priced, riding the RAM surge.

So I turned to another secondhand market, Yahoo Auctions (Yahoo! Japan’s auction site).

I didn’t really get it at the time, but it seems the Yahoo Auctions search screen also shows items from Yahoo Flea Market, Yahoo’s version of the black market. Among those items, I found one with the following specs:

CPU: Core i7-12700KF (12C/20T)
GPU: GeForce RTX 3070 8GB
RAM: 16GB (DDR4)
M/B: B760 Chipset
Power: Corsair RM750 (750W)
Price: 100,000 yen (about $640)

Compared to the one I’d gone for on Mercari, the cost is half. The specs are of course several generations behind, but during those 10 days of waiting, I’d come to feel that I don’t really need a cutting-edge high-end PC.

Use Case#

A little late, but let me write down what I actually use a desktop PC for.

I play a fair number of games, but I rarely touch the latest ones. If anything, I mostly play things released a few years ago whose reputation is already established.

For music production (DAW work), the graphics card is completely irrelevant. CPU power is sometimes needed, but even on my old PC I rarely felt stressed about it. The biggest problem is that it eats a huge amount of RAM. But that’s not something I can fix in this insane RAM market.

According to Gemini, these days you can set things up so that sound sources aren’t loaded into memory but played straight from a fast NVMe SSD. With that plus track freezing, I should be able to scrape by with 32GB of memory.

So the requirements settled as follows:

I don’t need a cutting-edge high-end PC
A GPU upgrade would be nice, but I’m not picky about it
What matters is better CPU performance and at least 32GB of RAM

Luckily, the PC I found on Yahoo Flea Market fully meets those requirements. Compared to my current i7-3930K, both single-core and multi-core performance improve by close to 4x. (And apparently the i7-12700 even draws slightly less power, which is wild. Technology is amazing.)

The seller offered to add 8GB x2 of RAM for +7,000 yen (about $45), but I passed, since I was planning to move over the 16GB x2 that’s in my home server.

With 200,000 yen hanging in midair, ordering another 100,000 yen PC on top of it did send a cold sweat down my back. But this time the shipping was prompt, and it arrived safely on the morning of 1/1.

A Mercari PC arriving now would only be a headache, but I decided not to cancel it on purpose. If the seller somehow recovers from their “accident” and ships it, I can part it out and make a bit of profit. I won’t deny there’s some vengefulness in it too: for all the irritation they put me through, I’d like them to start 2026 with a little guilt.

Moving the RAM#

The Yahoo Flea Market PC was listed as having “minor scratches,” but what arrived was spotless, like new (or maybe it actually is new?).

It was so beautiful that I thought about putting it on my desk, but when I tried, it took up way too much space, so I gave up and put it under the desk like always.

Needless to say, the exterior was great, and the NVMe SSD’s condition in CrystalDiskInfo was perfectly healthy too: 400 power-on cycles, 2,400 hours of use, and 15TB of total writes.

Now all I had to do was add the server’s 16GB x2 to it. …Or so I thought, but after adding the memory, the machine either wouldn’t boot properly or wouldn’t recognize the RAM even when it did.

The cause seemed to be that the RAM in the new PC runs at 3200MHz while the server’s memory runs at 2400MHz. That opened up a few more options.

Settle for 16GB#

After using the new PC a little excessively for a day, memory usage was constantly over 90%. If I tried to do music production on top of that, a flood of memory cache would be unavoidable. Strongly rejected.

↑This is what happens with just a few browsers open. In KSP (Kerbal Space Program), the memory hit its limit and I got stuttering whenever I did interplanetary travel on the Tracking Station.

Drop the RAM Clock to 2400MHz#

I haven’t tried it, but running just the 16GB x2 I pulled from the server at 2400MHz should work fine.

But then I started to wonder how much dropping the memory clock to 2/3 would hurt performance.

From what I could find, opinions were split on whether memory clock matters. Some people said it makes a dramatic difference, others said there’s barely any difference. Strange.

Digging further, I found this take: “If the CPU is the bottleneck, improving memory clock has a big effect, but if the GPU is the bottleneck (that is, in a lot of games), it has no effect at all.” Yeah, that would explain why opinions are split right down the middle.

So which one would be the bottleneck for my use case? Obviously the CPU.

And so the idea of moving over the server’s 2400MHz 32GB memory was itself rejected, a bit late in the game.

Buy 3200MHz-Compatible RAM#

I searched brick-and-mortar stores and the internet, but everything was priced like it had lost its mind. Rejected.

Beg the Seller#

So I sent the seller a message saying I’d like to buy the RAM that had been offered as an add-on after all. It was a last-ditch lifeline, the kind where failing means checkmate, but luckily they agreed to ship it separately. An absolute saint.

Moving the RAM, Part 2#

Moving the memory. (I’ll write this once it arrives.)

Setup#

Since this is a shiny new PC, I decided to build a clean, untouched environment while consulting Noelle (the Genshin Impact character; it’s the persona I have Gemini play).

The old me would have downloaded each piece of software’s installer from its official site and mashed “Next” one by one, but this time I adopted the “modern Windows management” Noelle recommended.

The themes: “don’t pollute the C drive” and “be able to recreate the same environment whenever I rebuild.”

Mass Summoning with Winget#

Apparently, even Windows 11 now ships with a standard package manager called winget. No reason not to use it.

Instead of hunting for installers in a browser, I just chanted an incantation like the following in PowerShell (as administrator), and the set of tools Noelle recommended got installed on their own.

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winget install --id Microsoft.VisualStudioCode, Git.Git, Microsoft.PowerToys, voidtools.Everything, ShareX.ShareX, Valve.Steam ... (rest omitted)

With that, VSCode, Git, and Steam are all set up in a single strike. Future updates apparently take just one command too. Amazing.

Defending the C Drive#

The system drive this time is a blazing-fast 1TB NVMe SSD, but if I’m careless it’ll fill up in no time with junk files in “Downloads” and “Desktop.”

So I connected the 2TB HDD moved over from the old PC as the “E drive” and changed the location of all the Windows user folders (Downloads, Documents, Desktop, etc.) to the E drive.

That makes the C drive a sanctuary “for the OS and applications only,” with data living on the HDD, a clean division of labor. It should keep the NVMe from slowing down and extend its lifespan too.

Also, the old PC’s C drive is connected as the new PC’s D drive. I plan to run it like this for about a month, and once I’m confident there’s no more data left to salvage, I’ll format it and reuse it as second-string storage for games and the like.

The Elite Tools I Installed#

Here are a few of the tools I was especially glad I installed in this rebuild.

Everything:#

I installed it to search the contents of the 2TB HDD inherited from the old PC. It’s blazing fast compared to Windows’ built-in search (practically instant), and finds the file I want in an instant even in a terabyte-class jungle.

This was my first time using it, and it’s the tool that impressed me the most.

PowerToys (FancyZones):#

The monitor I got this time is a 34-inch ultrawide (UWQHD). It’s so huge that I didn’t know how to arrange my windows, but with this I can split the screen into any layout I like and snap windows neatly into place just by dragging while holding Shift.

ShareX:#

The ultimate screenshot tool I’ve been using forever.

LatencyMon:#

A tool that diagnoses whether a PC is suited for audio processing, for music production use. The measurement showed no driver conflicts and a green “suitable” verdict. Now I can run heavy projects with peace of mind.

Other Little Tweaks#

Keyboard: Switched to the US layout.
Clock: Set Windows time to UTC (so the time doesn’t drift if I dual-boot with Linux in the future).

Where Things Stand#

Even though I’m carrying the bomb of insufficient memory, the power of the Core i7-12700KF and RTX 3070 is overwhelming!

Skyrim (LE) with around 100 mods now runs at 60FPS with room to spare.

In Ace Combat 7, it no longer crashes from running out of VRAM even at high quality settings. I can fire off 12 MPBMs (Multi-Purpose Burst Missiles) from a modded fighter without a stutter. Anchorhead goes down.

In Factorio, UPS (updates per second) improved from 40 to 60.

In KSP, I can launch giant rockets and, up to 2x physics warp, no frames get skipped anymore.

One quietly noticeable benefit of the CPU upgrade: while writing this blog, hot reload of the local article preview got blazing fast. Before, I was waiting a bit under a second; on the new PC, it’s instant.

Next I want to play Genshin Impact, but by my calculations the Homeward Path gifts of the returning-player event unlock tomorrow, so I’m doing my best to hold off.

Noelle’s Comment#

Honorary Knight, great work on the new PC deployment operation!

This project was a string of hardships: the “bad weather” of DDR5 memory prices soaring, plus the logistics trouble on Mercari… But you overcame them with calm information analysis and a strategic retreat, and in the end you built a fortress (PC) as sturdy as “rock,” with a Core i7-12700KF and an RTX 3070. Well done, Honorary Knight!

In particular, setting down the iron discipline of “don’t pollute the C drive” during setup, and arranging a system where “the same environment can be recreated whenever you rebuild” by making full use of Winget and symbolic links, was so rational it could serve as a reference even for the Knights of Favonius’ logistics management. I’m glad “weapons” like Everything and FancyZones seem to have settled right into your workflow.

For now you’re running within the 16GB memory limit, but even so, the performance gains in Ace Combat 7 and KSP are striking. Once the “final supply shipment (additional memory)” arrives from the Yahoo Flea Market seller, this fortress will finally reach its true, complete form.

And then… your patience in waiting a whole day without opening the door right in front of you, all for Genshin Impact’s “Stellar Reunion” event. I sincerely look forward to welcoming you, Honorary Knight, to an ultrawide, max-settings Teyvat tomorrow!

Appendix#

1. Hardware Specs and Cost Facts#

Item	(Status Quo) Current	(B) Yahoo Auctions	(C) Mercari
CPU	Core i7-3930K (6C/12T)	Core i7-12700KF (12C/20T)	Ryzen 7 7800X3D (8C/16T)
L3 Cache	12 MB	25 MB	96 MB (3D V-Cache)
RAM Standard	DDR3-1600	DDR4 (standard unknown, the one I have on hand is 2400)	DDR5 (standard unknown)
RAM Capacity (Initial)	64 GB	16 GB	32 GB
RAM Capacity (Maxed Out)	64 GB	32 GB	32 GB
GPU	GTX 1060 6GB	RTX 3070 8GB	RTX 4070 Super 12GB
Motherboard	X79	B760 (Intel mid-range)	A620 (AMD entry-level)
Power Supply	Unknown	Corsair RM750 (750W)	Unknown (capacity unknown; listing mentions an AIO liquid cooler)
OS	Windows 10 Pro	Windows 11 Pro	Windows 11 (edition unknown)
Cost	None	100,000 yen	200,000 yen