We don't sell parts and we don't pad a build fee. You buy the components — or we help you pick them — and we charge €60/h for the work: sourcing advice, assembly, tuning and setup. On a simple build that's an hour or two. This one was not simple. A customer came in wanting the fastest single machine we could reasonably put together, colour-matched top to bottom, with a screen on the cooler. The parts came to about €6,000 at the time. The build itself — every hour of it — came to about €450. Here is where each of those went.
Custom gaming PC building and upgrades in Helsinki — €60/h, no markup on parts.
Book a PC build →The brief: matched to the work, and to the colour
Two things drove every choice. First, the work: the customer needed sustained top-end performance — high-refresh gaming and heavy GPU compute — so nothing could be a bottleneck, and the thermals had to hold under a full load for hours, not minutes. Second, the look: it had to be colour-coordinated throughout, and they specifically wanted the all-in-one cooler with an LCD screen on the pump. So part selection wasn't just the fastest chip on paper. It was the fastest chip that fit the board and the budget, the cooler that fit the loop and the aesthetic, fans that matched, and a power supply with the headroom to never be the limiting factor.
Parts — and what they cost today
Prices below are current Helsinki retail. We don't mark parts up — the customer pays what the shop pays; this is simply what the machine costs to buy today.
| Component | Part | Price |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | Intel Core i9-14900K | €519 |
| GPU | GeForce RTX 4090 24 GB | €2,200 |
| RAM | 96 GB DDR5-6000 CL30 (2×48) | €1,936 |
| Motherboard | ASUS ROG Strix Z790-E | €550 |
| Cooler | NZXT Kraken Elite 360, LCD | €334 |
| Case | Corsair 7000D Airflow | €291 |
| Fans | Corsair iCUE LINK RX120 ×3 | €112 |
| PSU | Corsair RM1200x Shift 1200 W | €263 |
| Storage | 2 × Samsung 990 Pro 4 TB | €1,340 |
| Parts total, today | ≈ €7,545 |
The whole difference is memory. Mid-2026 is in a DRAM and NAND shortage — the same 96 GB kit that was around €380 in 2024 is €1,936 now, and each 4 TB SSD went from roughly €280 to €670. That is about €1,500 of the total, on two line items alone. Everything else — the CPU, GPU, board, cooler, case, fans and PSU — is normal for this tier. The customer bought at the right time.
What the €60/h actually did
A pile of expensive parts is not a working computer. The bill on this build was €60/h for the best part of a working day — roughly seven to eight hours end to end. That is about €450 of labour on a machine worth six to seven thousand: six or seven per cent, to make sure the rest runs the way it should and doesn't cook itself in year one.
- —Sourcing and compatibility — choosing the parts around the customer's tasks and the colour scheme, checking clearances, confirming PSU headroom before a single component was ordered
- —Assembly on an ESD-safe bench — mounting, seating the 4090, standoffs, no shortcuts
- —Cable management — full routing behind the tray, photographed at handover, so airflow isn't fighting a bird's nest
- —The screen-equipped cooler — mounting the Kraken Elite, fresh contact on the CPU, and setting up the pump's LCD the way the customer wanted it
- —Fan curves and airflow — balancing intake and exhaust for slight positive pressure, so the GPU and CPU both stay in range under a sustained load
- —Windows and every driver — clean install, chipset, GPU, storage and peripheral drivers, BIOS set for the memory profile
- —Software setup — the applications the customer actually uses, ready on handover
- —24-hour burn-in — a stress test and a memtest pass, so a dead-on-arrival part shows up on our bench, not in the customer's living room a week later
On a machine like this, one unstable memory profile, a starved fan curve or a badly seated cooler isn't a problem you notice slowly — it's throttling, crashes, and heat the parts were never meant to sit in. The €450 isn't for turning screws. It's for the machine being correct, tuned and proven stable before it leaves the bench.
Why we bill by the hour, not a slice of the parts
Plenty of builders quote a build fee that scales with how expensive your parts are — ten per cent of a €7,000 machine is €700 for the same screws as a €1,500 one. We don't. €60/h is €60/h whether you brought a budget box or this. You buy your own parts wherever they're cheapest, we never mark them up, and you pay for the hours the job honestly takes — quoted before we start. Here that was around €450. On a straightforward build it's an hour or two.
FAQ
Do you sell the parts, or do I buy them?+
You buy them — wherever they're cheapest. That keeps our advice honest: we have no reason to push a brand or a shop. If you want, an hour of consultation gets you a full parts list to take shopping, matched to what you actually need and, if you care about it, to a colour scheme.
Seven hours to build a PC — really?+
For a build at this level, yes. A basic assembly is an hour or two. This was sourcing and compatibility across nine premium components, a screen-equipped cooler, full cable management, fan tuning for sustained load, a clean Windows and driver install, the customer's software, and a 24-hour burn-in. The hours are the difference between it posts and it's tuned, quiet and proven.
Was €450 to build it worth it?+
The customer thought so — it's six or seven per cent of the hardware to guarantee the hardware is set up right. The alternative is finding out at home that the memory profile is unstable or the GPU throttles under load, on a machine that cost as much as a small car.
Certified laptop and console repair master. Twenty years on the bench in Helsinki — tearing down PS5s, MacBooks, and gaming PCs and writing down what we learn.
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