Our habits often define us, forming core elements of our personalities. When it comes to the PC community, bad habits are rampant, painting a somewhat negative picture of PC users in front of everyone else. Trashing on consoles, complaining about remakes and remasters, and scaring everyone away from prebuilt PCs might be the most common examples, but they're far from the worst habits you'll come across.

From PC building and gaming to their response to marketing fluff, and being plain snobbish, PC users' bad habits cover a wide range of activities and beliefs. Let's get into it, so you can take out the pitchforks and shower me with some choice words in the comments.

7 Wasting money on unnecessary components

You don't have an unlimited budget, do you?

This one baffles me to no end. How can PC builders still blow their budgets on overkill components and peripherals while ignoring the core components of their PCs? Expensive motherboards, AIO coolers with LCDs, graphics cards with liquid coolers, and cases with screens are some of the worst things to waste your budget on. If you have unlimited budgets, then, by all means, go ahead, but most of the community isn't like that.

Even before ensuring their CPU, GPU, RAM, and storage are in place, many PC builders start obsessing over PC aesthetics. Looks matter, no doubt, but they shouldn't overshadow the performance and functionality of the PC. The bulk of your budget should always be reserved for the core components, which also include the power supply, which many users tend to ignore.

6 Buying more hardware than they need

Bigger numbers don't always mean more performance

Overspending on non-essential components is bad, but you also need to avoid wasting money by over-speccing the essentials. A powerful graphics card and processor might be critical for a modern mid-range gaming PC, but you don't need to spend a grand on a GPU, or more than $200 on a CPU, to build a great PC. Many PC builders still overspend on the CPU, buying 12-core or 16-core chips, only to use them for gaming, which doesn't need more than 6 or 8 cores.

I'm not one to suggest buying a budget GPU when you want to play the latest titles at 1440p high settings with ray tracing. However, you don't need an RTX 5080 to be able to do that. Similarly, buying that flashy 8,000MT/s DDR5 RAM or PCIe 5.0 SSD will not magically boost your FPS above what you can get with a 6,000MT/s kit and Gen4 NVMe SSD.

The power supply is another area where many builders are prone to buying overkill units. No one needs 1600W PSUs, not even for a PC with an RTX 4090 and Core i9-14900K. Most gaming PC configurations will never need more than a Gold-rated 1000W power supply. And for the outliers with an RTX 5090 and a 300W CPU, a 1200W-1300W PSU is more than enough.

5 Believing in busted performance myths

"Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary"

Sadly, numerous myths about CPUs, RAM, SSDs, and CPU coolers are still alive and kicking. I've already touched upon some of them in the previous sections, such as more cores, blazing-fast RAM, and PCIe 5.0 SSDs equaling more gaming performance than slightly slower equivalents. However, there are many other performance myths even enthusiasts stick to these days.

For instance, you will often come across people on forums recommending high-end AIO coolers to everyone building a new PC, when it's clear that air coolers are just as good as AIOs for most systems. CPU bottlenecking is yet another bogeyman PC enthusiasts run from, thinking the world will end the moment their CPU is slightly slower than the GPU. Future-proofing is still being thrown around, forcing many unsuspecting builders to overspend on their PCs.

Another laughable myth is that the human eye can't "see" more than 60 FPS. Even the average gamer can differentiate between 60 FPS and 100 FPS, the enhanced fluidity being instantly apparent. Going above 120 or even 200 FPS can benefit competitive gamers in other ways by lowering the input latency, and making the gameplay feel more responsive. Hence, it's time the community stopped extending the shelf life of these busted myths.

4 Pixel-peeping and obsessing over FPS

Just enjoy the damn thing you just built

While disregarding the benefits of high FPS is dumb, the other extreme is equally worse. PC builders will spend hours assembling their brand-new PCs, only to obsess over the slightest dip in framerates. This obsession carries over to small increases in CPU temperature, sudden bursts in fan speeds, and less-than-expected scores in PC performance benchmarks. Caring about performance numbers is understandable, but not to the point of becoming finicky about it.

When worrying about numbers prevents you from enjoying your brand-new PC, what's the point of getting a PC in the first place? Pixel-peeping is another bad habit of PC gamers where they strive to find the minutest irregularity in the image. Using upscaling or frame generation will never give you a native-like image, but the graphical artifacts or anomalies are often not earth-shattering. In fact, in most cases, they won't break your immersion unless you actively look for them.

3 Repeatedly falling for marketing hype

Come on, folks

PC hardware companies are highly skilled in generating hype for their products, even when their latest generation lineup doesn't deserve it. With gen-on-gen improvements getting slimmer every year, manufacturers are looking for every gimmick to latch on to, just to make the shiny new thing look, well, shiny. All that glitter is not gold, however. The vast majority of PC users don't always remember this saying, falling prey to multi-million-dollar marketing campaigns.

The latest example is Nvidia touting sky-high performance numbers for their RTX 50 series GPUs compared to everything they've launched before. While the Blackwell GPUs can technically spit out 4 times the FPS than, say, an RTX 30 series card, you'll hardly feel a 4 times increase in performance. AI-generated frames aren't equivalent to conventionally rendered ones, but Nvidia will conveniently ignore that detail when selling you their latest overpriced GPUs.

AMD marketed phenomenal gains before launching the Ryzen 9000 CPUs, and many users bought into the hype much before the third-party reviews showed that Zen 5 was nothing more than Zen 5%. Manufacturers will always do this in the name of business; it's our choice whether to believe the marketing fluff or take everything with a bucketful of salt.

2 Telling others to "just get a better PC"

It's never a good look

You may not be guilty of this yourself, but I bet you've come across these comments countless times on the internet. PC users just love to throw shade at others with less powerful hardware than theirs, thinking they're somehow superior for owning a more expensive piece of silicon. When the discussion in question is about the value-for-money of modern PC hardware, a random PC snob will enter the chat saying "Just earn more and buy a better PC".

Besides reeking of privilege and obscene elitism, such comments do nothing but feed into the "pay to win" mentality of modern PC gaming. Instead of emboldening companies to keep pushing out overpriced components that are pricing out the average consumer, many PC users blame gamers instead for being poor. This is just the real-life equivalent of "git gud".

The PC Master Race (PCMR) shouldn't be about making others feel bad about their machines. It should be a wholesome community of welcoming members where your worth isn't tied to the "hardware in your rig, but the software in your heart". These words don't just belong on the Reddit homepage of PCMR; they need to be reflected in our conduct.

1 Fanboying for multi-billion-dollar companies

Are they secretly paying you?

Finally, the worst habit I see in the PC community is being a fanboy of some or the other PC hardware manufacturer. You won't be able to rival UserBenchmark in unmasked devotion, so it's better to drop the act altogether. Going to bat for Intel, AMD, Nvidia, or someone else won't make your opinion worth more than that of others; nor will it pay for your next upgrade (unless, of course, you're a paid spokesperson for the company).

Even though I own shares in many of these giants, that doesn't magically create feelings inside my heart for these multi-billion-dollar companies. Your opinions, good or bad, should be based on objective benchmarks or personal experience, nothing more or less. The internet has evolved to the point that unfounded fanboyism can rarely go unnoticed; the community members have multiple sources of information to call you out for your questionable comments.

Keep your feelings away from your PC

I know that's harsh, and it might even sound nonsensical to some, but being rational about your PC and PC hardware, in general, is the right thing to do. Believing in myths just because they feel right to you, buying into the hype created by your favorite company, or admonishing others to "just buy a better PC" doesn't make you a better person. All it does is highlight the negative side of the PC community, and it's something we don't need more of.