Published Jun 3, 2026, 7:00 PM EDT His love of PCs and their components was born out of trying to squeeze every ounce of performance out of the family computer. Tinkering with his own build at age 10 turned into building PCs for friends and family, fostering a passion that would ultimately take shape as a career path.  Besides being the first call for tech support for those close to him, Ty is a computer science student, with his focus being cloud computing and networking. He also competed in semi-pro Counter-Strike for 8 years, making him intimately familiar with everything to do with peripherals. The AI boom has made building a competitive new PC genuinely painful. Memory and storage prices have surged to levels we haven't seen in years, and the parts that used to be afterthoughts now dominate the budget. So it feels almost contradictory to say that the same boom has made building a home server or lab easier than ever, but it truly has lowered the bar in ways that have nothing to do with price .…