Fair enough, you really aren’t spending much more, if any at all, on microcenter prebuilts if you’re lucky enough to have one close. There are tons of resources for learning, but if your time is worth more than the hundred bucks or so and you don’t care about customizing it to your needs, wants, or preferences, that’s totally understandable.

But yeah, tough time to get/build a gaming pc. Imo there are a few different strategies to deal with the crazy prices.

1. suck it up pay whatever it is to get what you want.
2. get a good base platform and skimp on some components that can be easily upgraded later.
3. get an old relatively dirt cheap system as a stopgap. Office pc + gpu? Gaming laptop with broken screen? But probably won’t have much resale value when/if prices do come down

Personally if I didn’t already have a pc and old parts laying around I’d go with #2. Get a case I like, decent mobo, cpu, psu. And I’d get a used couple generation old gpu, and absolute minimum viable amount of ram and storage until prices come down. Or I get a raise lol

Currently my desktop is a ryzen 7 1700 and Radeon 5700. It’s getting pretty old now, and if prices weren’t insane I’d have upgraded by now. But tbh, it’s fine. I don’t really care about playing the latest AAA games, and all the games I am interested in playing run absolutely fine at 1440p. So for the time being, it’s fine. I could upgrade the cpu pretty massively for not much money, but eh I’m really not bothered enough to do that until I get a new gpu. But a modest gpu upgrade is a ton of money, so not quite worth it to me yet.

Edit: oh and yeah if you do just grab a prebuilt, you will probably want at least a 9060xt or 5060ti for the gpu if you want to play like brand new AAA games at 1440p and high-ish settings