With hardware prices in cloud cuckoo land, now's the time to love the rig you're with. And here's how to make that PC love last

This time last summer, AMD's venerable Ryzen 7 7800X3D was selling for about £320 here in the UK. Fast forward one year of events that—well, let's not even get into them, we'll only depress ourselves—but fast forward one year, and the same chip sells for £380. And that's just here in the UK—over in the US there are even grimmer price spikes.

That's not to pick on one CPU, mind you. It's just one example that illustrates an industry-wide trend that can be surmised thusly: everything inside your PC case costs more now.