In the same way as Cycling, PC's and PC Gaming have been a part of my life for as long as I can really remember.
There have been a great crop of MMORPG's lately, First Descendant, Throne and Liberty, and now PoE2 hitting the ARPG market. Its really a good time for gamers.
Until you get to the gaming PC's part.. Blame Nvidia for that one, if you want a flagship GPU you need to be prepared to re-mortgage the house, or at least the Garage!
From a generally hardware side, its not all bad. Strong mid range is Plenty for even 4k gaming at respectable frame rates.
When building, in my view at least, the requirement for Custom liquid cooling has dropped away, at least on the CPU. Quality air cooling using heatpipes (controlled evaporative cooling) and AIOs (All In One sealed system water coolers) are getting ever closer to being competitive with custom water-cooling setups.
The one area this doesn’t ring true is on the GPU. In the last 10 years there has been a crossover (at least within Gaming/Benchmarking). Where the CPU used to be the beating heart of a system, with the single largest power draw, especially when pushing the clock, more and more now the GPU is the power-hungry monster. To the point where, if we carry on with our current trajectory, the CPU/Motherboard will be an ‘add on’ to the GPU, not the other way around as it is currently. While there are aftermarket air cooling solutions for GPU’s, they are often no better than the design and implementation from the Manufacturing Partner solutions that already come with the board.
To this end, its easier than ever to set up a custom water-cooling loop if you feel the need (ok, lets be honest, want.) With many companies making good kit, (phanteks, heatkiller, Ek, bitspower) and with push fit fittings being the norm now, no more leaky jubilee clips!! Case specific distribution plates (Alphacool, Singularity Computers) exist that save excess tubing (and a reservoir, but at a cost), as well as Very good solutions for full jacket GPU blocks so the VRam as well as the power delivery components get cooled, not just the GPU itself.
Honestly, unless you are specifically looking to benchmark, (or just enjoy the tinkering), quality air cooled or a good AIO (Be-Quiet or Arctic) are really good solutions now.
Hardware wise, it feels like a mixed bag right now, really not a great time to build a PC. For the CPU, AMD have got the parallel tasking crown with their Threadripper, and their X3D CPU’s are edging Intel out at the very top. GPU wise Nvidia are at the peak of performance, though their insane pricing/shocking availability and shoddy dealings with drivers, melting cables and trying to shut down reviewers that they don’t agree with does put them in a bad spot for me at least... AMD are doing well in the mid-range, and what is amazing to see is that for the first time in maybe 3 decades, a third party is getting a real foothold in the GPU market, and its Intel! They are not going to be winning benchmarks for a while, but at the lower end of gaming, they arguably represent the best FPS/£ ratio on the market.
What also can't go unmentioned here is the rise of AI and AI Agents, I'm toying with Replit and CrewAI to produce apps and interfaces over databases etc FAR faster than I could do otherwise.