PC Building Simulator 2 Review – A Practically Perfect Sequel

Building the Dream

One of the key attractions of PC Building Simulator 2 is undoubtedly having the ability to build (and test) your own virtual gaming PCs. – When you start, you’re given around 3-4 pre-made systems that you’re welcome to play around with. Of course, though, the fun really begins when you start assembling your own.

In this regard, the amount of real-world components you have to pick from is staggering and your only limitations pretty much come down to your imagination, and, of course, what can actually work with the hardware you’re choosing. – With that being said, however, the system used in PC Building Simulator 2 still isn’t 100% perfect.

At the time of writing, the latest hardware available in the game was the Intel 12th-gen Alder Lake/AMD Ryzen 5000 processors and the Nvidia 30XX/Radeon 6000 series of GPUs. – Updates will, however, be along to add new tech as it formally starts to roll out on a more generic level. – So, in a nutshell, you are currently limited to the best of what is essentially last-gen tech. Expect this to be brought up to date in regard to new additions in the very near future though!

Additionally, there are still more than a few little bugs to work out. Firstly (as above) you can see that the cover plate for the NVMe drive on my motherboard had somehow managed to lodge itself within my Nvidia 3090. – Additionally, when it came to overclocking, the BIOS for this virtual MSI Z690 GODLIKE wouldn’t allow me to save the changes so RAM was stuck at its default non-XMP speeds and I couldn’t play around with a virtual overclock of the CPU.

We have, however, been informed that many of these bugs (which are honestly quite minor at the moment given the overall complexity of the game and the components we’re dealing with) should be rectified before release day.

A second build attempt with an AMD Ryzen 5950X proved far more successful with me being able to overclock it with some pretty satisfying results. And in this regard, I think, overall, this ‘build your own PC’ mode is probably going to be the most popular among enthusiast users. – You have the ability to design, share, and even download other people’s systems to see just how fantastic and creative the community can be.

My systems might not be overly impressive to your eyes, but I typically tend to place more of a focus on sleekness rather than flashiness. With PC Building Simulator 2, however, you’re entirely free to both share and express your own opinion of what a gaming PC should look like.

Once you’ve put your system together, you can virtually benchmark it (with a number of popular tools such as Cinebench R20 and 3DMark TimeSpy) get a score, and see what you can do to make it even better. – I have no idea how ‘accurate’ the scores provided truly are, but what I can say is that overclocking does provide higher results. So if nothing else, the theory is solid.

From a personal perspective, I think I would honestly spend a lot more time in this ‘Free Build’ mode than I would in the actual career mode. – It really allows your imagination to run wild (and occasionally amok) in the pursuit of building the ultimate gaming PC that doesn’t just impressive in terms of virtual performance, but also in terms of aesthetics.

And hell, if you don’t want to go for outright performance, you can take a new direction with a compact system looking suited for a specific budget. And in terms of budget, the prices reflected in PC Building Simulator 2 are a surprisingly solid representation of their real-world value.

So yes, in theory, you can even use this to plan out a system you truly intend to build and have your budget, roughly speaking, all calculated for you!