R&D
72 MAXIMUMPC aUG 2019 maximumpc.com
alan dexter, executive editorThe build for This month’s cover feature is
laser-focused on value for money, and seeing
what you can do on an incredibly tight budget. This
build is the counterpoint to that. We barely looked
at the price tag during its construction, and didn’t
pay much heed to it when we did add it all up.
We did, of course, have a pretty good idea what
the best value components were, and what sort
of ballpark we were going to end up playing in,
but on the whole, money wasn’t a factor. No, this
machine was all about one thing: performance.
Specifically, we wanted to build a machine that
wouldn’t be constrained by bottlenecks. From the
off, we wanted to give the Asus GeForce RTX 2080
Ti ROG Strix Gaming OC room to strut its stuff,
and once you’ve got a serious bit of silicon like that
in your machine, lots of the other components fall
into place. The big selling point of this graphics
card, and the GPU that powers it, is that it makes
the dream of 4K gaming a reality. Yes, even at the
highest settings (although there’s an important
caveat when it comes to RTX titles: Even this
card struggles to maintain 60fps at ultimate
settings). Which means that while we generally
don’t include screen recommendations on these
pages, we’ll make an exception, and suggest that
this rig is ideally paired with a quality 4K monitor,
something like the ViewSonic VP3268-4K.
So, over the next few pages, we show you how
to build the sort of machine that dreams are made
of. Maybe not Maximum PC “Dream Machine”
dreams, but not as far off as you might imagine.
Let’s see what spending nearly 10 times the cost
of our budget build nets you....The ConCepT
Length of time: 3-4 HoursCooking Up a
Gamer’s Delight
LEVEL oF DIFFICuLTY: MEDIuMtake the most powerful mainstream graphics card around,
add high-end hardware and a little RgB, and bake at 4K