I want a gaming PC. I really want one. I want to build it myself, because that makes more sense price-wise. For example, with a great gaming PC, I can start streaming on Twitch.

Also, I've heard from fellow gamers that PCs are one of the best ways to play games. No, I'm not trying to run "Cyberpunk 2077" smoothly (although an RTX 3080 card would have been better than using an Xbox One X). My interest in owning a gaming PC is not rooted in playing recent hits. Rather, it's older games that I can't get on my PS4 or PS5.

But as much as I would love to start playing and streaming those games, there are plenty of reasons not to build a gaming PC.

Before this sentence goes any further, let me say that I have the utmost respect for those who build their own gaming PCs. I write this for the benefit of gamers who, like me, feel uncomfortable taking on the process.

This all started with a game I've wanted to play for years but never could: Persona 4 Golden, the predecessor to the wonderful Persona 5 and Persona 5 Royal, a game I've put hundreds of hours into over the past four years. [But P4G was a niche PS Vita exclusive. Then last summer, Persona 4 Golden came to Steam and I was excited. Until I realized that P4G ran so poorly on my regular machine that I would need to build a gaming PC to run it properly.

But when I thought about the work involved in actually building a gaming PC, I had many questions.

I had always been afraid of building my own PC because it is very easy to make mistakes. I am smart enough to know how to get electrical grounding so I don't accidentally break a component, but I am not good at tinkering.

Building a PC requires more than I have. The whole art of dealing with the system's BIOS (short for Basic Input/Output System, the operating system for the components) and other elements can be downright intimidating.

Take, for example, Tom's Guide's test PC. This PC spent over a month in what I would call a debugging process while Senior Editor Marshall Honorof, one of the smartest people I know, struggled to get everything working.

Somehow, the TG PC shuts down instantly upon startup and starts right back up again. (Like when you wake up and go back to sleep, when you should just get out of bed). This is obviously not the way to run a PC. When Marshall posted online for help, I retweeted his request and watched as people I knew tried to help.

Then one day, Marshall figured it out. The answer was so confusing that I was in awe of Marshall's success - and one more reason for me not to try to build my own PC. The test PC was plagued with overclocking-related problems.

Mousing through the BIOS revealed that Tom's Guide's PC had three active overclocking profiles. I don't know why so many profiles are active at once. And we would have spent even more time troubleshooting.

Why were there three profiles? The system had one additional overclocking profile for the CPU (shown as the Game Boost button) and one for each stick of RAM. This is counter-intuitive and an answer I would never come up with in a million years.

Of course, Marshall's story is still a triumph in the long run. He solved a problem, learned something by solving it, and now has a powerful desktop gaming PC. As much as I admire his results, I look at my own past month and a half and wonder where I would have had the time.

If you're finding it hard to restock your PS5 or find a new Xbox Series X, know that PC gamers face similar problems when trying to get their hands on the latest and greatest GPU (graphics processing unit).

The popularity of our article on where to buy the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 shows that even high prices do not help solve the skewed supply/demand ratio. Yes, even the $699 graphics card could be permanently out of stock.

But it gets worse: Scrolling through Amazon's dedicated GeForce GTX 3080 page is like walking through a shopping mall where almost every store is out of business. Everything is "currently unavailable" until there is a rare option sold by a third-party retailer, and the GPU is at least twice the price.

Nor is this a situation where buying an older generation GPU is wise. Certainly, gaming PCs are built to be upgradeable, but upgrading the GPU may also lead to upgrading the power supply, as the newer parts require more power. Furthermore, if you are building a gaming PC, it should be a near- to long-term investment. You don't want to buy something that will require an immediate upgrade.

And after all, the parts cost for the aforementioned Tom's Guide PC totaled about $1,655. And this is without a monitor. While not shockingly high for a computer, this is three times the price of a PlayStation 5.

Indeed, a good gaming PC can perform many more functions than a console. It is not only a work machine for playing games, but also for productivity and online streaming. But I have already chosen the macOS world for productivity and have no intention of leaving anytime soon.

Let's get back to the video games that got me thinking about building a gaming PC. I spent many hours this summer testing "Persona 4 Golden" on a number of PCs, including a powerful Surface Book 3 with a Core i7-1065G7 CPU and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti GPU. However, I still ran into performance issues.

I asked around and found a disturbing common refrain. They told me that I probably shouldn't be playing games on my laptop. Even this old PS Vita game.

So I turned to Matt Enloe, an online acquaintance who had tweeted about playing a PC port of "P4G," for help. Among other suggestions, he said, "I would recommend not trying to play video games natively on a laptop," and that "cloud gaming would be a better option for mobile."

That logic made sense when broken down. Demanding high-end games would probably run better on a desktop PC than on a laptop. Tower PCs are designed to dissipate heat and cool better than laptops, allowing the desktop to work harder.

If the studio's optimization is poor, this could be true even for games that should not be overloaded. In the end, thanks to my testing of the Tom's Guide Ultimate Home Office Awards, I had a laptop powerful enough to perform this task, with a 2.3GHz 10th generation Core i7 H-series Intel CPU and RTX 2080 GPU. The Acer ConceptD 7 Ezel runs this old game as well. (I am pissed that I needed a $3,999 laptop to run this old game. Yes, I know. A more affordable laptop might do this trick. Perhaps. But this adds to my frustration with the PC gaming world. I don't want to fiddle around with settings, turning V-Sync on and off, to get the graphics to look right. Definitely one of the reasons I am a console gamer.

The only reason I approach Windows in my personal time now is Persona 4 Golden. Other than that, I have seen very few games that require a PC to play. And after all, PC games are often released on consoles. Just look at Microsoft Flight Simulator being released on the Xbox Series X. Maybe we'll get lucky and Atlus will release P4G on PS5. Who knows. [But there is Half-Life: Alyx, League of Legends, and Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition. These well-known PC games are fortunately (due to budget and time constraints) outside of my interests.

For now, my admiration for PC games is on hold. Hopefully the cost and scarcity of components will come down sooner rather than later. I would also like to get a COVID vaccine from a PC gaming expert I know. Not only for health reasons, but also so I can share a room and get their help directly.

But right now, it doesn't seem to be easy to build a gaming PC. That path would waste a lot of time and money.

Of course, my opinion will change soon enough when the right exclusive titles and experiences come along. Building a gaming PC is a lot of work, but it also has its own appeal.