Building a $1,115 PC That Outperforms the Mac

The timing couldn't be worse for building a PC. RAM prices have doubled. Supply chains are still recovering. And Apple just released the M4 Mac Mini starting at $1,270, which—let's be honest—is genuinely impressive silicon.

So when Tech Notice's Lauri Pesur posted a 16-minute defense of PC building in 2026, my first thought was: this better be good. Because the default response to "should I build a PC right now?" has been "wait six months" for about eighteen months straight.

Turns out, he's onto something. Maybe.

The Build: $1,115 and Change

Pesur's base configuration comes in at $1,115.19, which undercuts the Mac Mini M4 https://www.apple.com/mac-mini/ Pro by about $150. Here's what that gets you:

MSI MAG B650 Tomahawk motherboard
AMD Ryzen 9600X (6-core CPU)
Thermalright Assassin X120 cooler ($18)
1TB NVMe SSD
32GB DDR5 RAM (Crucial Pro, $325—ouch)
MSI RTX 5050 GPU ($240)
MSI 650W power supply ($60)
Gambia case with four RGB fans ($49 after coupon)

The component choices tell you something about the market right now. That $325 for 32GB of RAM? "Usually, we're getting 64 or 96 GB for that type of price," Pesur notes. Two years ago, you'd have laughed at paying that much. Today, it's the best deal he could find.

The RTX 5050 is an interesting pick—it's the weakest card in Nvidia's 50-series lineup, but Pesur argues it punches above its weight for video editors: "The 5050 has better encoders than 4090 which is ridiculous." That's referring to hardware encoding for H.264 and H.265 codecs. For $240, you're getting media engines that outperform cards costing four times as much.

The Upgrade Path (And Why It Matters)

Here's where the PC versus Mac argument gets interesting. Pesur maps out an upgrade path that brings the total to around $1,800:

Ryzen 9900X CPU (12 cores, up from 6): adds $250
Arctic Liquid Freezer 3 360mm AIO cooler: needed for the beefier CPU
RTX 5070 GPU: doubles the price but significantly boosts performance
850W power supply: adds $18, future-proofs for higher-end GPUs
NZXT H5 Flow case (white version): $69 (down from $95)

The appeal isn't that you should buy all this at once. It's that you can buy it later. Your $1,115 investment doesn't become e-waste when you need more power—it becomes the foundation for something better.

With the Mac Mini, you're locked in. That 24GB of unified memory? That's what you're living with until you buy a whole new machine. The 512GB of storage? Hope it's enough. Apple's integrated approach delivers impressive performance-per-watt, but it's a one-way door.

What the Benchmarks Actually Show

Pesur claims his configurations beat the Mac Mini M4 Pro, and his test results support that—though with some asterisks. The 9600X doesn't match the M4 Pro's CPU performance in single-threaded tasks. Apple's silicon still has an efficiency advantage. But the RTX 5050 (and especially the 5070) deliver GPU performance that Apple can't touch at this price point.

The real question is: does that matter for what you do? If you're editing 4K video with heavy effects, yes. If you're compiling code or running LLMs locally, maybe. If you're browsing the web and writing emails, absolutely not.

The Intel-Shaped Hole in This Story

Notice what's missing from Pesur's recommendations? Intel. He briefly mentions why: "The 13th, 14th gen now it's kind of falling off that sweet spot... And the Intel, you know, CPU degradation also puts a little bit of a sour taste on it."

That's industry-speak for "Intel's recent chips have been failing at alarming rates, and nobody wants to talk about it too loudly." The Raptor Lake degradation issues aren't just PR problems—they're legitimate reliability concerns. When you're recommending a build that people will live with for years, steering clear of potentially unstable silicon makes sense.

AMD's winning by default here, which is a weird position for a company that spent most of the 2000s as the scrappy underdog.

The Actual Cost of "Upgradeability"

Let's be honest about something: most people never upgrade their PCs. They buy the thing, use it until it's too slow, then buy a new thing. The upgradeability argument sounds great in theory, but in practice? Your 2026 motherboard will support 2026 CPUs and maybe one generation newer. Your DDR5 RAM will work in future builds, sure, but by the time you're ready to upgrade, there will be DDR6 or whatever comes next.

The real advantage isn't that you'll definitely upgrade—it's that you can if you need to. If your workload changes six months in and suddenly you need more GPU horsepower, you're not buying a whole new machine. You're buying a new GPU. That flexibility has value, even if you never use it.

It's insurance, basically. And like all insurance, whether it's worth the premium depends on your risk tolerance.

The Timing Question Nobody Wants to Answer

So should you build a PC in 2026? Pesur's answer is yes, with the caveat that "it's not the most ideal time, but it still makes much more sense than any of the alternatives."

That's... not exactly a ringing endorsement. But it might be the most honest take. RAM prices are terrible. GPUs are transitioning between generations, creating weird pricing. Intel is wounded. And Apple's M-series chips are legitimately competitive in ways that would have seemed impossible five years ago.

But if you need a powerful machine right now—if waiting another six months for prices to potentially improve isn't an option—then Pesur's build makes sense. You're getting real performance for reasonable money, with the option to improve it later.

The alternative is buying a Mac Mini and hoping Apple's decisions about RAM and storage match your needs three years from now. For some people, that works great. For others, it's a gamble they'd rather not take.

Pesur ends his video by saying he's considering building a PC himself after years with laptops and Macs: "I'm a PC guy. I think I'm going to go back to the roots and actually enjoy some raw power and no performance loss."

Maybe that's the real answer. Not whether PC building makes objective sense in 2026, but whether it makes sense for you. If you want the control, the upgradeability, the ability to fix things yourself—then the inconvenient timing doesn't matter much. You were always going to build anyway.

—Mike Sullivan