What PC do I need, and what power supply does it take?

It depends entirely on the frame rate and resolution you are targeting, and the jump between tiers is steep. Roughly $650 buys a machine that holds 60 FPS at 1080p, about $960 gets you 144 FPS at 1080p, around $1,540 covers 144 FPS at 1440p, and 4K at 60 FPS is closer to $2,150. Those are complete-machine figures at MSRP for the reference parts, so treat them as planning numbers rather than quotes.

Add up the peak draw of the CPU, the GPU and everything else in the case, multiply by 1.30 to leave 30% headroom, and round up to the next standard capacity — 450, 550, 650, 750, 850, 1000, 1200 or 1600 W. Use the peak power figures from the spec sheets, not the marketing TDP, because transient spikes are what trip a PSU’s protection.

Two reasons. Efficiency peaks around 50–70% load, so a PSU running flat out wastes more energy as heat and ages faster. And modern GPUs draw very short spikes well above their rated board power; a unit sized exactly to the steady-state number can trip its over-current protection on those spikes, which shows up as a random reboot under load rather than as an obvious power problem.

No. A PSU only delivers what the system draws, so an oversized unit is not dangerous — but it costs more and runs at a less efficient point on its curve. Beyond that, wattage alone does not make a good PSU: the 12V rail capacity, the quality of the internals and the 80 PLUS efficiency rating matter more than the number on the box.

For gaming and everyday use, yes — 16 GB is the current sweet spot and going to 32 GB rarely produces a frame-rate difference. Software development and video editing are where 32 GB genuinely pays for itself, because compilers, containers and timelines will use whatever you give them. Below 8 GB anything modern starts swapping to disk, and that is the slowdown users actually feel.

Yes, and it is free performance. Two matched sticks run in dual-channel mode and roughly double the available memory bandwidth compared with a single stick of the same total capacity. The difference is large for integrated graphics and measurable in gaming, so 2×8 GB beats 1×16 GB almost every time.

Each vendor publishes its own throttling point: Intel Core CPUs at about 100°C, AMD Ryzen at 95°C, NVIDIA GeForce GPUs around 93°C and AMD Radeon as high as 110°C. Reaching those is not damage — the chip drops clocks to protect itself — but it is silent performance loss. Aim to stay 15–25°C below the limit under sustained load.

It depends on the room. What matters is the delta over ambient: 80°C in a 20°C room is a 60°C delta and points at a cooling problem — dried thermal paste, clogged fins, poor case airflow. The same 80°C in a 35°C room is only a 45°C delta, meaning the cooler is doing its job and the room is the constraint.

VA is apparent power and watts are real power; the two differ by the power factor of the load. For sizing purposes the usable wattage of a typical consumer UPS is roughly 60% of its VA rating, so a 1500 VA unit supports about 900 W. Buying by VA alone is the classic way to end up overloaded — always compare your real watt draw against that 60% figure.

Far less than most people expect, and deliberately so: a UPS is designed to bridge a brief outage and allow an orderly shutdown, not to keep you working. Five to fifteen minutes at a normal desktop load is typical. Runtime rises sharply as load drops — halving the load more than doubles the time — which is why plugging a monitor and a laser printer into the battery outlets is such an expensive mistake.

Every three to five years for a standard sealed lead-acid unit, sooner in a hot room, since capacity fades continuously from the day it is installed. The runtime you measure when it is new is the best it will ever deliver, so plan around roughly half of that toward end of life and test under real load once a year.

Modern CPUs and GPUs already boost themselves to whatever their power and thermal budget allows, so manual overclocking returns much less than it did a decade ago. Undervolting is usually the better move: the same or nearly the same performance at lower voltage, lower temperatures, less noise and no reduction in component lifespan.