AI PC Building Site Creates Parts Lists With Wacky Prices, Takes Forever

A new PC builder website has cropped up that supposedly helps gamers and professionals build a potent bang-for-buck system with the power of artificial intelligence. Known as pcbuilderai.com, the site aims to take the guesswork out of building an effective PC parts list and give users the best possible parts list with the best components for the price. But, despite the site's modern and simplistic UI, some of the parts it recommends are out of whack with today's market prices.

The creator of PC Builder AI is a company known as AE Studios. According to the company's Indeed page, the company has no venture capital, no outside shareholders, and is apparently focused on creating tech for the development of humanity. The company has already built several AI-based programs, including games, image generators, and text-based AI generators.

To test the effectiveness of the PC Builder AI parts list generator, we grabbed three of our Best PC Builds for Gaming parts lists, priced at $500, $1500, and $3600, respectively, and compared them to the three parts lists the AI-accelerated site generated with the same prices.

Starting at the $500 price class, the PC Builder AI site generated a moderately decent gaming machine featuring a Ryzen 3 3200G. Still, it's an old APU and nothing special, and some components are overpriced. The biggest offender is the memory, which is $40 more expensive than the kit we recommend, with the same capacity and speed. The storage configuration is also bizarre, consisting of a separate 1TB HDD and a tiny 120GB SATA 3 SSD reminiscent of pre-2020 era systems. With the Best SSDs priced at an all-time low right now, you can find 1TB M.2 drives for the same price as the SSD and the HDD combined. This would yield a far better gaming experience and significantly increase the storage speed overall.

The lack of a graphics card is also unfortunate for the AI generator. In our build, we could squeeze in a significantly faster Core i3 CPU and an Arc A310 discrete GPU, which will be more capable than what the 3200G can provide.

Sadly, the $500 system was the best machine the PC Builder AI website could generate. The $1500 price bracket reveals many pricing problems with the AI system, leading to terrible component choices.

The AI generator's most absurd component choice was the GPU, selecting a $600 RTX 3060 Ti. If you know anything about the GPU market today, you'll know that paying $600 for a previous-generation mid-range 60 series card is utterly ridiculous. You can get a current generation RTX 4070 for that price, which is substantially faster than the 3060 Ti. Alternatively, you can get an RX 6950 XT for that same price. It is AMD's flagship graphics card from the same generation as the 3060 Ti and one of the Best GPUs for gaming.

The CPU choice is also horrible. For some reason, the AI generator chose another previous generation product, a Ryzen 5 5600X, priced at $280. In today's market, that CPU is going for nearly half that price, and a modern Ryzen 5 7600 is still $40 cheaper. For $280, you can get a current generation i5-13600KF — one of the Best CPUs —that can run circles around the 5600X in gaming workloads and heavily multithreaded applications.

The rest of the system is also not great; the motherboard, memory, cooler, and storage options could be much better. Even though the CPU and GPUs are wildly overpriced, we could put in more storage capacity, memory capacity, a higher wattage PSU, and a better cooler in our $1500 build recommendation while spending the same amount of money on the CPU and GPU.

The same pricing errors also appear in the $3600 build, where the CPU and GPU are incredibly overpriced. The PC Builder AI generator opted for an $800 Ryzen 9 5950X and a $1200 RTX 3080 Ti in this price class. Right now, a 5950X is going for as little as $450, and the 3080 Ti has been easily eclipsed by the newer RTX 4080 at the same price — or again, you could get roughly similar performance for as little as $600 in the form of a Radeon RX 6950 XT. Another option would be the RTX 4070 Ti, which costs $800 and generally outperforms the 3080 Ti.

Thankfully, the rest of the components are not too bad for a $3600 build and have decent quality/performance for the money, but it's not perfect. The SSD choice, in particular, is very strange, with the AI opting for a PCIe 3.0 970 EVO Plus 1TB SSD. For just $10 more, you could get a 990 PRO that is PCIe 4.0 capable with 2TB of storage, or opt for a 1TB Crucial T700 with PCIe 5.0 support. The 64GB RAM option is appropriate for a $3600 build at least, though opting for a previous generation DDR4 platform at this level is strange.

Overall, the results AE Studio's PC Builder AI currently generates are very bizarre, and it's not a site we can recommend you use for sound guidance on PC part selection. The site never recommended a current-generation CPU or GPU and priced the graphics card options from the GPU shortage in 2021. We are unsure what AI system the site uses, but it possibly uses information that's from two or three years back, which would explain the bizarre component choices.

If you want good advice on good parts to choose for your next computer, check out our forums or our AI Chatbot, which will generate far better results.