Hey, I have never built a PC myself.

random anecdotal history of my computer use

I had one back then, Windows 7 and Minecraft as far as I know, pretty bad, solved through Optifine (the typical “double your Minecraft performance” trick, to this day, wtf Microsoft).

Then I got a Thinkpad T430 and did some hardware “hacking”, custom EC firmware (and then a modded AX200 Wifi card and Greencell battery), custom BIOS, tried a quad core i7 CPU which was an overheating and batterydraining mess.

Then a weird “in between” Thinkpad T495 which ½ sucks (horrible firmware, very bad CPU, bad screen), ½ rocks (fprint support, best keyboard in history).

Now a friend of mine does more GPU intense stuff, mainly static Adobe design thingd, already tweaked and debloated Windows 10 but the laptop sucks extremely.

They think about getting a PC and I suppose hunting for parts could make sense? I would want to get a modern motherboard which good performance, 32GB RAM max, reasonable GPU.

And I have an AX200 (pcie) wifi card, which is the weird thing that brought me to this question: can I use that on a PC mobo, or is there a problem?

What “laptop parts” (i7 intel cpu but laptop model, GPU, LP-DDRx RAM,…) make sense in a PC?

Is a Mx mac the best option if you want Adobe stuff? I never used Apple stuff and I fear that ecosystem, but Windows is total cancer and Mac is at least kinda Unix based, so I imagine it must be way better than Windows, and the hardware is currently so much better.