yes, that’s the way I usually upgrade my hardware by keeping parts like case, power supply, disks, … A good case can used for 10 years or longer. The same is true for the power supply.
CPU sockets do change too often to keep the same motherboard and every 2-3 years new sockets appear on the market.
So, how many women do you know who buit their own PC?
3, out of a not-super-large friend group. The rest are content with their laptops, or have boyfriends who are more into tech and built one.
Edit: I guess the point is that your gender has little to do with it, just your curiosity and whether you think the benefits outweigh the hurdles.
Honestly nowadays with the way things are designed it is nearly impossible to mess it up. Everything is basically designed to only plug in one way and only in the right spot. Everything is also labeled and you even have instructions. Hardest part is making sure you don’t bend the CPU pins.
I remember my first pc build it was much harder back then because nothing was really labeled well and most of the plugs were all the same and could fit in multiple places uhg…
Gender does not matter building is very straight forward anymore to the point where the instruction are basically step by step plug and go. The little screws can be frustrating tho.
ok, I just had a look at that pcpartspicker website. I think it is not only more expensive to build a PC, like at least 300 Eur more expensive. The most important disadvantage is time.
I am a women who has neither kids nor a real time-consuming career and therefore I actually have some time (I don’t even cook or clean regularly). But even I think that I probably don’t have the time to choose between 300 motherboards and 30 Geforce 1660 Super GPUs.
Btw, yesterday I talked with a friend about this. She is a Mac user and basically a tech idiot, I think she does not even know people who built acomputer except the guys who modified the Macs at the office (I think almost everybody around her is a Mac user). She told me I should build one 
Macs are a different story. For the most part, they are intended to be, and are generally used as, off-the-shelf appliances. You choose the configuration with what you want/need, then you just use it.
There are exceptions, of course.
I mean don’t get me wrong Macs are nice, reliable, and crazy easy to use. Until you try to do something outside the little bubble niche they are designed around. Then they become a pain. The OS is rather nice but the closed up nature always becomes a burden at some point. Like the deprecation of opencl breaks a lot of software that will either lose support or has to be re written for metal in the future. The new SOC nature of the new systems will just lock it down even harder.
PC is honestly the best way to go for sure especially if you like open source.
Established system builders do have some level of preferential treatment, e.g. they can actually buy GPUs without going through scalpers. At least from what I’ve heard from a local shop - they are allocated a certain number of units per day. They are only allowed to buy the units as long as they are guaranteed to be sold as part of a preassembled system.
The end result is that in many cases it’s actually cheaper to buy an entire system and remove the GPU than to buy the unit standalone.
If there’s any argument right now for NOT building your own machine from parts, it’s that phenomenon. If you build from parts, you’ll be paying a nasty markup to a scalper for the GPU.
There is definitely an effort to pick components, but I do think it’s worthwhile:
I upgraded my CPU/mainboard/cooler/memory some weeks ago, after using the last set for 9 years. Considering that, it’s a fairly small time investment. It was a Xeon E3-1245 (SandyBridge Generation, similar to a i7-2700K, 3rd Gen i7 maybe, 4C/8Th) - most used for the exact same software. It is definitely worthwhile to use a modern CPU, because you can actually see how far to adjust things while dragging sliders, especially RT feels a lot snappier. I went with a AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 12-Core Processor (reasonably priced for a few days), hoping to get a similar service time out of that one for photo purposes.
I found that once I picked the new CPU, the mainboard fell largely in place with a handful of choices - admittedly narrowed down because I kept my micro-ATX form factor case. For memory, even getting any non-gimmicky (no LED) low profile modules at the desired size and speed rating left little choice when it came to availability. I spent a little more on a cooler than essential, but I wanted something know quiet with a long-lasting fan. Hard to go wrong if you pick anything slightly overspec’d in term of power handling ability.
Apart from the above, I was able to keep: Case, power supply (went with a highly efficient one 9y ago, still quietly doing its job), graphics card which I had added sometime mid-way, disks accumulated over time (3xSSD, 1xHD). In comparison, I do like my very well built inexpensive small Dell server, running very efficiently, to which I just added disks. But if anything essential shall fail, I’ll have to replace it completely, I’m afraid.
For a long service time, I would definitely recommend to go with a CPU from a current generation, such as the 5000-series Ryzen 7 or 9 - independent which way you go.
That’s what I was going to ask. So it’s smarter to get the above mentioned Captiva with the Ryzen 7 5000 than the Lenovo with the Ryzen 7 3000. I think it is easier to upgrade the GPU than the CPU, right?
Yes, there are already a number of mainboards (chipsets) that support the 3000 series but not 5000. On GPUs, AMD just added support for PCI expess version 4 on the latest mainboard chip sets, so buying/building a PC with a mainboard supporting that will ‘future proof’ it for a few years with respect to GPUs.
The only thing I don’t find in the specs of the Captiva is the sound chip.
For the captiva there is this MB listed:
Specs say sound chip is some Realtek® ALC892/ALC897
At least for this build it would be easy to replicate the components in a wish list e.g. at geizhals.at and compare prices and specs.
Which is the other side of the coin I was talking of. You use them the way they come, or you start breaking things.
Hey speak for yourself, I built 2 and helped my brother build his. 
Honestly, if you built with legos, this is not that far behind apart from some parts. Difficult part would be the studying on what part does what and which of all of those fits your needs.
I did not ! ! ! 
Don’t pick between 300 motherboards and 30 1660 GPUs. If you don’t want to, don’t build the PC yourself (and no, it’s not that easy, for example my motherboard can hardly take the RAM modules, as the slots are quite tightly spaced, and the modules have radiators to dissipate the heat, which take quite a bit of space – this took me by surprise, as I have not built a PC in over 15 years).
There are companies who build PCs, or offer PCs assembled from standard components, giving you a few options to configure. If I were you, I’d go for a low-end gaming PC (since you really don’t need that top-end GPU), and add more RAM, or forget ‘gaming’ completely (which is just a marketing term to charge more for stuff).
The other solution is to follow someone’s build (that is, they have already selected a motherboard, CPU etc.).
A 2-year-old used PC could also be a good option.
Ah, yes as @kofa mentioned to follow someone build, the magazine you are @betazoid writing for publishes every year a special on PC builds for three categories: office, medium and gaming.
This article series are nice and they also test Linux compatibility.
It varies - at least some of Asus’ gaming laptops are surprisingly reasonably priced, such as my ROG Zephyrus M. Strangely, other ROG laptops with similar specs have price points much higher…
But for desktop systems, yeah, likely anything that is “gaming” is going to be primarily pretty lights and $$$$.
Don’t you put denoise at the very, very last step before export? After denoise I don’t do edits. If I would I would delete the denoise and re-do when finished.
But I guess your dual monitors add stress too. I use an external 27" 2560 x 1440 (laptop screen is off then) .
Sometimes I close Chrome (it hogs lots of RAM), which helps too (I should do some research on how to max RAM temporarily)