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BEST GRAPHICS CARD
NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 3070 FOUNDERS EDITION
$499 EDITORS’ CHOICE Lllll
While Nvidia’s launch of “Turing”-based graphics cards landed a bit tepidly in the minds of
most cost-conscious gamers, the company’s new “Ampere” cards are finally bringing big
power down to a more reasonable price. As a midrange GPU, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070
Founders Edition finally makes high-detail 4K gaming a possibility for anyone shopping for a
graphics card around the $500 mark. Top it off with a suite of additional supported features
such as DLSS, ray-tracing, Nvidia Broadcast, and Reflex low-latency mode, and you’ve got the
complete PC gaming package in one card.55
BEST HIGH-END CPU
AMD RYZEN 9 5900X
$549 EDITORS’ CHOICE Llllh
In the world of desktop CPUs, AMD has been on a tear for the past year and a half, lapping
Intel in cost-per-core and content-creation tasks with regularity. But until the AMD Ryzen 9
5900X, the company still lagged behind in one crucial area: gaming. No more! The Ryzen 9
5900X—as well as the rest of the chips released in the company’s new Ryzen 5000 Series of
CPUs—have proven themselves to be highly capable gaming engines, also shattering records
in core-sensitive content-creation benchmarks across the board.56
BEST BUDGET CPU
AMD RYZEN 3 3300X
$120 EDITORS’ CHOICE Llllh
The AMD Ryzen 3 3300X is a budget CPU that proves you don’t need a whole heap of extra
cores—and bucks—to get serious gaming performance from your desktop PC. At just four
cores and eight threads, the Ryzen 3 3300X regularly wrangles capably with Intel CPUs that
are twice or even three times as expensive, in games such as Counter-Strike and Rainbow Six:
Siege. The Ryzen 3 3300X makes it possible to build a powerful gaming PC on a budget while
leaving enough cash to invest in a high-refresh monitor or a beefy GPU to complete your frag-
tastic package.56 54 55(^5857)