MID-RANGE

Approximate Price: $1,573

BUY CLEVER, and this build could cost you a whole lot less. There are at least $65 worth of mail-in rebates lurking in there, and we canvassed prices (worst luck) just following the end of a big sale period. Times were not the kindest to us—they may be kinder to you. With our midrange monster suffering price hikes across the board, we’ve bitten the bullet and made a few switches. Zotac’s GeForce GTX 1070 Mini, once a bargain, leapt up to $420, making spending an extra $30 and jumping to Asus’s nice-priced 1070 Ti far less worrying. To offset that and other rises (cough, RAM, cough), we’ve switched out the cooler for the lowest-end AM4-compatible radiator we could find ($40 saving), and specced down the SSD just a little to save another $60. Not that these changes will impact the grand vision of this machine: Ryzen 5 and that 1070 Ti in tandem will tear through 1080 and 1440p games, and you can push the clocks if you wish.