If you've been tapped into the PC building community, you'll agree that things haven't changed much on a fundamental level. Essentially, you will always need the same basic parts to build a gaming PC. On the other hand, some PC components and technologies have all but disappeared from existence after having their moment in the sun. Whether it's due to the introduction of superior replacements, or growing irrelevance for the majority of builders, those PC components now only live in our memory.

As I've been building PCs for more than two decades now, I have seen many of these components come and go — wanting to experience them for myself, but never getting a chance to do so. By the time I saved enough money to splurge on these fancy parts, they had already become part of PC history. So I will wistfully cover them here, in a walk down memory lane.

3 Sound cards

I was too late to the party

Some of you might be looking at this one fondly. Dedicated sound cards were a mainstay of gaming PCs until the late 90s and early 2000s. You might have treated yourself to a Creative Sound Blaster in one of your earliest gaming builds, creating haunting echos while obliterating enemies in Quake and Doom. The reason sound cards were considered necessary in the past was because the onboard audio in PCs had not been up to snuff. Outside a few beeps, it couldn't provide a solid audio experience for either gamers or audiophiles.

However, as fate would have it, I never got around to using one of these because my very first PC came with decent onboard audio, removing any need for a dedicated sound card. I wasn't an audiophile back then who would have gone out of their way to get a superior audio experience by using one of the popular sound cards. But I still wish that I had the chance to use one, just for the sheer satisfaction of plugging my speakers and headphones into it, and experiencing great audio like any cultured person should do. But, alas, it was never meant to be.

2 Custom water cooling loops

Largely irrelevant and a bit too pricey

You might agree that overclocking isn't as relevant as it used to be. Well, the same is the case with custom water cooling loops. There are many benefits to open-loop CPU cooling, but for the vast majority of people, the best air coolers or liquid AIO coolers are more than enough to take care of every gaming, productivity, or benchmarking workload. Outside of superior esthetics and slightly better thermals, water cooling is a gimmick for most people.

That said, my younger self didn't think this way. I was fascinated by the gorgeous promise of clean and efficient water cooling loops and wanted to set one up for my own PC. But, my budget was always limited, and spending money on a custom loop instead of a high-end graphics card, faster SSD, and a minimalist PC case wasn't an option back then. Besides, I wasn't really confident at the time that I'd be able to master one on my own. Now, given the current state of things, I think they're more trouble than they're worth.

But, a small part of me still wishes that I had somehow given in to the impulse years ago, arranged the funds, and built myself a custom water cooled gaming PC.

1 Dual graphics cards

My lost fantasy

Perhaps the biggest regret of my PC building career is missing out on running dual GPUs. This trend didn't happen very long ago either — Nvidia and AMD produced SLI (and later NVLink) and CrossFire, respectively, to power multiple GPU setups as recently as the mid-2010s. The most decked-out gaming PCs of the time proudly showed off dual GTX 1080 Ti or Titan RTX setups. Having the power of not just one, but two graphics cards felt like the ultimate flex to me.

It was almost like outfitting a slick sports car with NOS to give it that extra bit of oomph and performance. Whatever the fate of multi-GPU gaming, I always dreamed of experiencing it on my own gaming PC. But, again, my broke younger self got in the way of those dreams, and I had to make do with a single Radeon HD 5670, GTX 760, or GTX 1050 Ti. By the time I could afford the cost of a dual GPU setup, the tech was already obsolete, made redundant by modern graphics cards.

I wish multi-GPU gaming could come back someday, if only to fulfill my childhood fantasy.

Modern PCs almost look boring compared to these fancy setups

Sure, I have a reasonably high-end gaming PC now with an RTX 3080 and a dual-tone theme going on, but it feels awfully bland when compared to the beauties of the past with elaborate custom loops and dual GPUs. We might have gained a lot in efficiency and performance, but we sure lost something too — a sense of wonder and a raw connection with our machines. There's no guarantee that we'll return to that vibe, but a man can dream.