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, plus 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 PS5 or the Microsoft Xbox Series X? 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: Which Graphics Card Do I Need? 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 has faded, though. While multiple-video-card gaming is still a path to raw power, 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. Since September 2020, this has been through its RTX 30 Series GPUs, such as the flagship GeForce RTX 3080 and top-end RTX 3090. These replaced its RTX 20 Series GPUs, like the (still powerful and pricey) RTX 2080. In general for both Nvidia and AMD GPUs, the first number in a model name denotes the GPU generation—3000 Series GPUs are Nvidia’s latest, while AMD is up to the 6000 line—while the last two numbers denote the hierarchy within that generation. For example, the RTX 3080 is superior to the RTX 3070, and both replaced their RTX 2080 and RTX 2070 predecessors, respectively. 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.) The 30 Series is based on the Nvidia’s newest „Ampere“ architecture, replacing the „Turing“ design of the 20 Series. The 30 Series GPUs not only offer better raw frame rate performance, 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 RTX 3080 Founders Edition launched with a $699 MSRP, as much as some whole computers on its own, but actually a better value than the RTX 2080. The RTX 3070 launched at $499, making it a very palatable choice, and the RTX at an even more attainable $329. That’s a much better entry price into ray-tracing than the 20 Series offered. As always, third party manufacturers make less (and more) expensive versions of each GPU, too. There is, of course, the elephant in the room: availability. If you haven’t been paying attention to the graphics card space, it was extremely difficult to actually acquire these GPUs at retail price (or in general) through 2020 and 2021. You can pay over the odds from re-sellers (some of who gobbled up many cards with the intention of reselling them at a higher price), but otherwise have to play the lottery with re-stocks. Nvidia, unfortunately, expects this to continue through most of 2022. Read our explanation here of why these graphics cards have been so difficult to purchase. Thus, the listed MSRP of these GPUs doesn’t mean what it once did. You can try to snag one when a major retailer like Best Buy (or online seller like Amazon) refreshes its supply, but like buying a PS5, you’ll need some luck. You’ll also need to be patient, unless you want to pay hundreds of dollars over the list price to someone selling a GPU for profit. This is one reason why buying a prebuilt gaming desktop these days makes a lot of sense: easier access to the parts you want, without price gouging. You may be able to find older GPUs instead, though the shortage has made these more scarce as well.
