If you like something a little more statement-y, the Fractal Design North ($155) and Lian Li Lancool 217 ($120) both include the wood accents that some case makers have been pushing lately. The Fractal Design case comes with both mesh and tempered glass side panel options, depending on how into RGB you are, while the Lancool case includes a whopping five case fans for keeping your system cool.
The “God Box”
What it’s good for: Anything and everything.
What it sucks at: Being affordable.
Cost as of this writing: $4,891 to $5,146
We’re avoiding Xeon and Threadripper territory here—frankly, I’ve never even tried to do a build centered on those chips and wouldn’t trust myself to make recommendations—but this system is as fast as consumer-grade hardware gets.
An Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 guarantees the fastest GPU performance you can buy and continues the trend of “paying as much for a GPU as you could for an entire fully functional PC.” And while we have specced this build with a single GPU, the motherboard we’ve chosen has a second full-speed PCIe 5.0 x16 slot that you could use for a dual-GPU build.
A Ryzen 9950X3D chip gets you top-tier gaming performance and tons of CPU cores. We’re cooling this powerful chip with a 360 mm Arctic Liquid Freezer III Pro cooler, which has generally earned good reviews from Gamers Nexus and other outlets for its value, cooling performance, and quiet performance. A white option is also available if you’re going for a light-mode color scheme instead of our predominantly dark-mode build.
Other components have been pumped up similarly gratuitously. A 1,000 W power supply is the minimum for an RTX 5090, but to give us some headroom, why not use a 1,200 W model with lights on it? Is PCIe 5.0 storage strictly necessary for anything? No! But let’s grab a 4 TB PCIe 5.0 SSD anyway. And populating all four of our RAM slots with a 32GB stick of DDR5 avoids any unsightly blank spots inside our case.
We’ve selected a couple of largish case options to house our big builds, though as usual, there are tons of other options to fit all design sensibilities and tastes. Just make sure, if you’re selecting a big Extended ATX motherboard like the X870E Taichi, that your case will fit a board that’s slightly wider than a regular ATX or micro ATX board (the Taichi is 267 mm wide, which should be fine in either of our case selections).
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