A lot of users here probably have a laptop and for me that had been the case since I joined. In fact i've had 3 laptops since I joined here xD. People were building computers and I was in awe like "omg how did you even do that" and I was ever so doubtful about whether I could manage something like that so I always went with laptops.

The problem with laptops (minus gaming laptops) are the small range of games that would run well on them, the prices are generally much more expensive for and you get less performance. Take my laptop for example. It is an Acer Aspire F 15, a laptop that set me back close to $900 that has 8 gb of ram, 1tb harddrive a core i5 6200U that runs at 2.3ghz and a dedicated nvidia 920M which is a laptop graphics card with 2gb of video memory. I could player games emulators and old games very well, games like CS:GO at medium settings, low settings in the Sims 4, Overwatch at Low settings and GTA V at its lowest settings with shadows disabled, all at the native screen resolution of 1366x768 which isn't HD (720p?). Not too bad but horrible to play on. Especially temperature issues really make gaming on laptops particularly painful as being burned by hot air isn't fun.

So I got my money together and built myself my first PC. I will admit the end result isn't perfect. There were quite a few issues but overall it was a great project and perhaps other people might one day create their own computer.

Getting the Parts
I had a budget for my pc parts. Around $800 AUD. I of course did most of my choosing of parts by using PC part picker, a wonderful tool that ensures you have compatible hardware. My biggest fear was buying incompatible parts however this fear was quashed with this website. I picked all the parts I needed then tried to locate the cheapest prices I could get with the cheapest shipping (because I had to, there is no PC store where I am).
Next came youtube. Boy did I watch so many videos for benchmarks on the games I play the most. It was fun to see what potential performance gains I could get and I was impressed at how much better it was than my laptop.
After ordering my parts on January 25th, I received the last parts I needed for the build on the 14th of Feb.

Building the PC
Perhaps you are wondering... what parts did you get then? I will get to that later.
So the time came to put the PC together. Around 5 days before I got my PC Case, I test assembled the PC outside the case. I put it together and it worked first boot which I was proud of. I installed windows and other programs to prepare it... then had a certain owner tell me I killed my PC by building it outside the case *cough* its still working Cyp *cough*
The next step was to put the parts in the case. Now I couldn't get a fancy case but I did get a fairly decent case. The problem really came with routing wires. I liked the fact the power supply cables were sleeved and didn't look too messy, however, the cables were short resulting in some very tight fits and "barely reaching the port on the motherboard" kind of situations no matter how the cables were routed. The case was quite cheaply made with standoffs being hard to screw in, a loose washer, and some weird "once you take off the back pieces for your graphics card to slot into so you can reach the back ports, they won't go back in".

Over all, despite the crazy cable management issues and having to reposition the motherboard a lot, I managed to get the build done in an hour and a half, breaking nothing and being grateful I didn't have to worry about coolers and other more complex things.

The Specs
But who can forget the most important question... what are your PC specs. Well lets keep in mind I built my PC as a budget friendly build that could do 1080p gaming better than my laptop. So the parts I chose were:
Pentium G4560 CPU clock speed of 3.5ghz (Dual Core, Hyperthreaded) This CPU may not be dual core but it works very nicely for the games I play and its cheap price compared with a Core i3 makes its great for budget friendly builds.
8gb Ram (single channel DDR4) Ram prices are insane right now so I had to stick with 8 gb
1tb Hard drive
Deepcool Tessaract Case SW (comes with a funky looking side window and two blue LED fans)
Thermaltake smart rgb 500w power supply (cute RGB!)
Nvidia GeForce 1050TI (perfect card with good performance in games I play. Haven't played a game that it hasn't been poor at running yet and barely creates a bottleneck- CPU is the bottleneck).
Asrock 250bm pro4 Motherboard (not overclockable however decently priced with no issues so far.)

So in comparison with my laptop:
Old games work just as well
CS:GO from medium to high settings
Overwatch from Low to Ultra settings
GTA V from Low to High settings
Sims 4 from low to highest settings

And from 720p to full 1080p gaming.
Now I cannot say my PC in total cost less than my Laptop due to having to add a keyboard, mouse and monitor. But for the added performance, the upgradability and the jump from lower resolution to higher resolution gaming this PC has everything I need. In the future I hope to grab an SSD and a better CPU but this whole experience has been great.

Conclusion
So would I recommend you build yourself a PC? Perhaps.
Firstly you would need to consider the price of ram and even graphics cards are expensive right now. It may be worth waiting for Ram prices to stabilize.
If you play more than just minecraft then consider a cheap PC to enjoy those other games much more than a laptop.
If you really only play games that even a potato can run then perhaps you don't need custom rig.

It was a great experience for me being able to see something i put together be a usable piece of tech and I hope my long essay have given you some inspiration

 

In case you guys wanna know what it looks like,