You can’t buy a more powerful gaming platform than a tricked-out desktop PC. Here’s everything you need to know, part by part, to pick the right killer gaming system, along with our current favorites, culled from our top-rated reviews.
Despite the allure and simplicity of gaming consoles and handheld devices, PC gaming is still very alive and very much kicking. Indeed, it’s never been stronger. Enthusiasts know that nothing beats the quality of gameplay you can get with a desktop built for gaming. And today, it’s within almost every determined PC shopper’s grasp to get a PC with the graphics power necessary to drive the latest games on a full HD (1080p) monitor at lofty detail settings. But what kind of PC can make major 3D games look and run better than they do on the Sony PS4 Pro or the Microsoft Xbox One S? If you have deep pockets, your answer could be a custom-built hot rod from an elite boutique PC maker such as Falcon Northwest, Maingear, or Velocity Micro. But a couple of well-informed choices will go a long way toward helping you get the right gaming desktop from a standard PC manufacturer like Acer, Asus, Dell, or MSI, even if you’re not made of money. Here’s how to buy your best gaming desktop, regardless of your budget, and our top 10 latest picks in the category. This is, admittedly, simplifying a complex argument. But high-powered graphics, processors, and memory improve the graphical detail (in items such as cloth, reflections, hair), physical interactions (smoke, thousands of particles colliding), and the general animation of scenes in your favorite games. Throwing more resources at the problem, such as a more powerful graphics card or a faster CPU, will help, to an extent. The trick is to determine which components to favor, and how much. Most Important: Consider the Graphics Card Most gaming systems will come preinstalled with a single midrange or high-end graphics card; higher-priced systems will naturally have better cards, since purchase price typically correlates with animation performance and visual quality. AMD and Nvidia make the graphics processors, or GPUs, that go into these cards, which are made by third parties such as Asus, EVGA, Gigabyte, MSI, PowerColor, Sapphire, and XFX (to name just a few). Our gaming-desktop reviews will let you know if there is room in the system’s case for adding more graphics cards, in case you want to improve your gaming performance in the future. Most boutique manufacturers, however, will sell systems equipped with multiple-card arrays if you want to run games at their best right away. AMD calls its multiple-card technology CrossFireX, and Nvidia calls its solution Scalable Link Interface (SLI). This trend is fading, though. While multiple-video-card gaming is still a path to great gaming, know that a game must be written to leverage multiple cards properly, and game developers in recent years have been de-emphasizing timely support for CrossFireX and SLI in games. Sometimes this support only emerges well after a game’s debut; sometimes it never comes at all. Also, Nvidia has been putting a damper on SLI in the last couple of years; it has kiboshed support for installing more than two of its late-model cards at the same time, and only a subset of its higher-end cards can be installed in SLI. Our general advice for mainstream buyers is to concentrate on the best single card you can afford. Indeed, the most pivotal decision you’ll make when purchasing a gaming desktop is which card you get. One option, of course, is no card at all; the integrated graphics silicon on modern Intel Core and some AMD processors is fine for casual 2D games. But to really bring out the beast on 3D AAA titles, you need a discrete graphics card or cards, and these cards are what distinguish a gaming desktop. Whether you go with an AMD- or Nvidia-based card is based partly on price, partly on performance. Some games are optimized for one type of card or another, but for the most part, you should choose the card that best fits within your budget. If you’re buying a complete gaming desktop, you of course don’t have to pay for a card in isolation, but this should help you understand how the card factors into the total price. You also have to know what you’re shopping for. ‚Ampere‘ Is Here: The State of Graphics Cards For some time now, Nvidia has been dominant at the high end of the GPU battlefield. From September 2018 through to September 2020, that dominance had been through the strength of its uber-high-end GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, as well as the still-pricey GeForce RTX 2080. Those two cards were followed by a step-down GeForce RTX 2070, still a powerful GPU in its own right, followed by the GeForce RTX 2060. These, and the company’s other GeForce RTX cards, were built on what Nvidia calls the „Turing“ architecture, at that time supplanting the 10-Series „Pascal“ cards as its latest top-end GPUs for gamers. The 20 Series GeForce RTX cards were the first to offer ray-tracing (putting the „RT“ in „RTX“), a fancy real-time-lighting feature that only cards with the RTX moniker are capable of running. (See our primer on ray tracing and what it means for PC gaming.) In 2020, though, Nvidia took the RTX advantage even further with its latest 30 Series GPUs. Based on the new „Ampere“ architecture, the extreme GeForce RTX 3090 and the flagship GeForce RTX 3080 arrived in the fall. These not only offer better raw frame rate performance than the 20 Series GPUs, but much are much more efficient and effective at ray-tracing. Ray-tracing technology looks great, but is a straining technique that generally pulls down your frame rates, a fact that made smooth ray tracing daunting on even the RTX 2080. This undermined the appeal of the 20 Series, given that the signature feature was difficult to run smoothly, even with the highest-priced GPUs. The RTX 3070 and the RTX 3060 Ti arrived in October and December 2020, respectively, delivering on the same concept at lower price points than the two top-tier options. The top-end cards are certainly pricey propositions, and too costly for many shoppers. The MSRP for the Founders Edition versions of the RTX 2080 and GTX 2080 Ti launched at $799 and $1,199, respectively (though some third-party models are a little more affordable). The RTX 30 Series GPUs are not only more powerful, but better values: The RTX 3080 Founders Edition launched at $699, undercutting its less powerful predecessor. That’s much more bang for less buck, and the power-to-price ratio looks even better compared to the supremely pricey RTX 2080 Ti. Speaking of the top of the stack, the $1,499 GeForce RTX 3090 is a professional-grade replacement for the Titan RTX. You could use it for gaming, but it’s not remotely twice as fast as a RTX 3080 for more than double the money. Buying these cards on the open market these days often means paying well more than MSRP (GPUs have been in short supply through 2021), and that is one reason why buying a prebuilt desktop these days makes a lot of sense: easier access to the parts you want. One aspect not included in the 30 Series launch is the „Super“ suffix that you may see on 20 Series GPUs while shopping. In the summer of 2019, Nvidia launched upgraded „Super“ versions of the 20 Series RTX line, with the exception of the RTX 2080 Ti. The RTX 2060 Super, the RTX 2070 Super, and the RTX 2080 Super are, as you may have guessed, souped-up versions of the initial releases, and came with a price cut to boot. The performance jump is greater with some Super GPUs than others, but these essentially replaced the original versions of each GPU.
