HARDWARE SELECTIONS
GPU
NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 4090 FOUNDERS EDITION
Love it or hate it, the RTX 4090 is still the king of GPUs. With 24GB of RAM, 76.3 billion transistors, and plenty of CUDA cores, it makes 4K gaming at 120 fps a stone-cold reality.
There are, of course, some caveats. First, you need a decent motherboard to support it (digitally and physically), and you have to consider the power supply situation. We’ll come onto that
in a bit with our PSU of choice for this build, but please bear in mind that this card has a 450W TDP (toned down from 600W prior to launch), and as such needs to be treated with respect.
$1,600,www.nvidia.com
CPU
INTEL CORE I9-14900K
This pivotal piece of the puzzle packs some potent performance buried deep within its refreshed Raptor Lake architecture. There are eight performance cores with hyper-threading, and 16 efficiency cores without. A 3.2 GHz base has a 6 GHz boost clock, and 68MB of L2 and L3 cache across the board. Couple that with an overly impressive memory controller and an incredibly aggressive price, and you’re left with a versatile processor that is more than capable of handling any game or heavily threaded workload task without breaking a sweat. $598,www.intel.com