PLUS!

Nvidia’s RTX graphics cards may be ahead of their time, but what sort of rig can you build with one now?

Build a kick-ass game-stomping

RTX 2080 Ti

PC today

LENGTH OF TIME: 2-3 HOURS

LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: MEDIUM

THE CONCEPT

ON THE SURFACE, this should be a fairly straightforward “Build It.” The remit is simple enough: Piece together a reasonable home for Nvidia’s latest and greatest graphics card, the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. Having said that, the word “reasonable” takes on a slightly different angle when said graphics card is going to set you back $1,400. Plus, there’s the added fun that we don’t know for sure which processor is going to give this new silicon the necessary room to strut its stuff, because we’re in unknown territory when it comes to ray tracing. Do we want more cores, faster single-core performance, or some hitherto unknown combination of the two?

We briefly toyed with the idea of pairing this new graphics card with Intel’s even newer Core i9-9900K, which you’ll find reviewed on page 78. We backed out of that idea, though, as we felt that we’d be treading on the toes of the forthcoming Dream Machine (while we haven’t made the final decision on the CPU for that build yet, the Core i9-9900K is in the running). The other reason we didn’t want to build with the new Intel CPU is that building with two completely new pieces of gear is just asking for trouble—much better to go with something that you know for certain just works.

So, the star of the show here is the graphics card, pure and simple. And while we don’t entirely know how everything is going to shape up for the future of hybrid rendering, we do need to give that card room to breathe. That means plenty of RAM and storage, and all ensconced in the kind of case that shows off your new super-expensive polygon-pushing pride and joy.