PC Gaming can be a very expensive pursuit and as you move up the performance ladder, the price of components can quickly outpace the diminishing gains in performance. Aiming to build a budget PC rig can quickly balloon into midrange territory if you’re not careful, and as such it’s important to take the cost of every component into consideration.

This guide, however, focuses on building a high-end PC gaming rig and the following components are currently the best in their class.

CPU: Intel Core i7-8700K

The arrival of Kaby Lake and Z370 has changed the game, literally. The Core i7-8700K has the highest clock speeds ever offered by Intel and the 6 cores provide a huge boost to overall processing power compared to the earlier Kaby Lake processors. For gaming purposes specifically, the i7-8700K beats every other Intel processor in nearly every game.

Motherboard: Asus ROG Strix Z370-E

While Coffee Lake is a new platform, there are already plenty of Z370 motherboards available to choose from. The Asus ROG Strix Z370-E is a fantastic motherboard with everything you could need and plenty of things you’ll most likely never use. It overclocks as well as any other Z370 board we’ve tested so far and it comes with useful extras like 802.11ac WiFi and USB 3.1 Gen2 (10GBps).

Memory: G.Skill Flare X 16GB DDR4-3200 CL14

RAM can often be a challenging question to answer when it comes to building a high-end rig – should you opt for clock speed or quantity? While quantity is a factor up to a certain point, going beyond 16GB requires very specific workloads before you truly benefit – which isn’t really necessary for playing online roulette Canada and most entertaining online games. As such, we felt it best to go for top-tier memory in the form of G.Skill’s Flare X 16GB DDR4-3200 line which has incredibly tight 14-14-14 timings.

Graphics Card: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti

Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1080 Ti takes the crown of top-tier graphics performance: we average over 60 fps at 4K in testing and the card delivers close to 100 fps at 1440p. Combine this with a 1440p 144Hz G-Sync display and your games will glide by with ease.

Power Supply: EVGA Supernova 850 P2 Platinum

EVGA’s P2 series is a favourite of ours when it comes to power supplies as they improve on the already impressive G2 line and boast 80 Plus Platinum efficiency as well as a fully modular design that keeps cable clutter to a minimum. EVGA backs its premium power supplies with a 10 year warranty and the PSU’s run quiet and cool.

Storage: Samsung 960 Evo 1TB

SSD’s have always been more expensive than HDD’s and this is unlikely the change for another decade or two. However, the arrival of non-volatile memory express (NVMe) is a step beyond SATA drives and performance is impressive. The Samsung 960 Evo delivers read speeds of up to 3200MB/s and write speeds of 1900MB/s.

CPU Cooler: NZXT Kraken X62 v2

NZXT’s Kraken series of CPU coolers are an excellent choice for all-in-one closed-loop solutions and while they’re not the least expensive options, they’re easy to install and work well. The Kraken X62 includes a large 280mm radiator so it’s important to make sure that your case can handle such a large cooler.