There is no bait guaranteed to hook a PC gamer like someone on social media asking for advice on a PC build—especially if that someone is a celebrity with 2.8 million followers, like actor Chloë Grace Moretz. The star of Kick-Ass and new sci-fi series The Peripheral has recently been tweeting about her gaming habits, saying she was "obsessed" with the Modern Warfare 2 beta back in September and that she seriously wanted to get into sim racing. Now it looks like she's at the tipping point of going full-blown PC gamer.
Early Wednesday, Moretz tweeted the bait, asking "to all my gaming friends out there—for a PC set up, where should I begin, how deep do I need to get into the intricacies of it?"
Okay last question, to all my gaming friends out there - for a PC set up, where should I begin , how deep do I need to get into the intricacies of it ! I know that I can keep customizing the set up as I go right?October 26, 2022
Three hours and some 750 responses later, she'd already gotten the usual spread of responses: influencers and other fans recommending boutique PC builders, others recommending building it herself, and brands thirstily offering up their own rigs. (I've got to give special thanks to reader Chris Thornett, who recommended PC Gamer's own Alan Dexter as a veteran hardware expert).
If I were Moretz I would've quickly given up on responding to a thread with 750+ replies, but I'm heartened that she wrote back to a few folks who recommended building over a prebuilt rig and called out PCPartPicker as an invaluable resource. As our EIC Evan Lahti wrote years ago, building your own PC is a special experience.
"It's pretty much adult legos," one fan tweeted, which got a response from Moretz. "Adult legos is literally a dream haha yes," she wrote.
After a rough couple years of overpriced or unavailable stock, it's finally a good time to build a PC again:
- Intel's i5-13600K is a killer gaming CPU at a good price and power efficiency
- High-end NVMe SSDs are getting closer and closer to $1 per gig
- Even RGB lighting is a lot less tacky than it used to be
Moretz is a race fan and already has a wheel setup and a care package from Logitech to kickstart her gaming setup, but if I could make a couple suggestions to any new PC gamer:
- Don't skimp on the monitor: a quality, high refresh screen is so nice. For a race fan, I think the best choice right now is the slightly curved 34-inch Alienware AW3423DW. 175 Hz refresh and HDR on an OLED!
- Get a great chair—and maybe not a "gaming" chair. We can tell you about the best gaming chairs, but I'd recommend the Herman Miller Embody or even better, the Steelcase Gesture, over a gaming-style bucket chair.
Once she gets her rig up and running, I hope Chloë Grace Moretz falls fully into the PC gaming tinkerer's life and discovers the Sunday morning joy of installing 30 mods for a game and then never playing it, or undervolting a CPU to get just as much performance for less power. If she and Henry Cavill ever cross paths, I like to imagine they'll have a deep discussion about Noctua fans. They really are the best.
