There’s never been another gaming machine that has anything like the heritage of the PC’s gaming history, and I’m gray-haired enough to say I’ve been there for nearly all of it. I’ve been a PC gamer ever since my Dad brought our very first PC back to our house in the 1980s, and I marveled at what you could do with 512KB of RAM, an 8MHz 8086 CPU, and four colors. The best PC gaming hardware has had many evolutionary turning points on its journey from beige business box to RGB-laden games machine, so I thought it would be fun to rank the kit that really changed the game, so to speak.
My plan for this feature was to only focus on core PC gaming hardware, along with controllers. It would quickly become unwieldy if it got bogged down with the best gaming monitors and the best gaming laptops over the PC’s long history, though those would also be interesting features in their own right. I wanted to focus on the core gaming kit that was either outstanding at its time, set new standards for hardware, or was seen as the benchmark by which other hardware is judged.
25 WD Raptor X
I’ll admit it feels a bit weird putting a hard drive on this list. After all, it’s difficult to get excited about a technology that has so comprehensively been superseded by another: the SSD. However, back in 2006, the WD Raptor X was a revelation of a hard drive. The company identified a gap in the market that had PC hardware enthusiasts and gamers giddy for this spinning disk speed demon.
Knowing that the actual tech inside its hard drives is actually pretty cool if you watch it in action, WD worked out a way of installing a polycarbonate window into this hard drive, meaning you could watch the head skip about over the spinning platters inside it. Not only that, but it was immensely fast. While most desktop hard drives spun at 5,400rpm, or 7,200rpm on a high-end model, WD’s Raptor drives brought the 10,000rpm speed previously only seen in enterprise-level drives to the gaming desktop. The only downsides were the high price and limited 150GB capacity of the drives.
With high-speed SSDs now replacing hard drives in most walks of life, you couldn’t make a premium, low-capacity hard drive now and make it profitable, but at the time, this was an awesome showpiece to mount on its side behind your case window. This drive proved that premium high-speed storage devices could be aimed at PC gamers with desktop PCs, and not just big businesses.
24 Intel Pentium G3258
Every now and then Intel throws a bone to cash-strapped gamers, producing an awesome CPU that challenges its expensive chips, but for an absurdly low price. The best example is the Pentium G3258, a dual-core CPU that launched in 2014 for just $75 and swiftly made any other sub-$100 CPU redundant for gaming.
As standard, it only ran at 3.2GHz, but unusually for such a cheap PC, Intel gave it an unlocked multiplier, making it easy to overclock. There was serious headroom here too – you could easily get it running at 4GHz, and I had it running at 4.5GHz when I tested it with a half-decent CPU cooler. Comparatively, the Core i3-4350 had a locked multiplier, the same number of cores, and a top speed of 3.6GHz, while costing $138.
It’s been a long while since we’ve had an awesome, truly budget gaming CPU that you can clock to high heaven now. How about a new one, Intel and AMD?
23 Logitech G Pro Wireless
While the Finalmouse Ultralight Pro set a new standard for lightweight gaming mice, it was the Logitech G Pro Wireless that finally united the holy trinity of gaming mouse goals, being lightweight, comfortable to hold, and wireless too. Its ambidextrous shape is super-comfortable to hold, and it also means you can use it whether you’re left or right-handed.
Plus, while its 80g weight isn’t record-breaking, it was really light for a wireless mouse with a battery inside it, and it achieved this without filling the shell with holes too. Meanwhile, its modular side buttons enable you to eliminate the chance of accidentally knocking buttons mid-game if you want to remove them, and Logitech’s LightSpeed wireless tech made for a lag-free wireless connection that really worked.
Read our full Logitech G Pro Wireless review.
22 Antec P180
Showing that your PC case didn’t need to either look like a boring beige box or a pointy, space-age dragon shell, the Antec P180 was the case of the moment when it launched all the way back in 2005. Clad in silvery-gray aluminum with a black plastic trim, the P180 looked sleek and stylish, with its front (magnetic) door concealing the drive bay openings behind it.
Inside, you could find drive bay cages mounted on rails so you could easily pull them out, while the PSU was mounted in the bottom, like many cases today, so you weren’t trailing wires all over the top of your motherboard. With superb build quality and loads of neat touches to make PC building easier, the P180 became a benchmark for years, spurring several variations, such as the P182 and P183, with different colors and features, including a very shiny chrome-finish P182 SE (pictured above).
It’s testament to the sheer quality of this case that I clung onto mine until 2014, nine years after it came out, housing several generations of different hardware in the process. Its limited fan mounts and lack of cable routing features would make it struggle to compete today, but it set a standard for stylish, minimalist case design that persists today.
21 Arctic Freezer 7 Pro
In all my many years as a PC gaming hardware journalist, I’ve never come across a cooler that became as ubiquitous as this unassuming heatsink and fan assembly from Arctic. With its almost absurdly low price, but surprisingly potent cooling power and supremely quiet operation, the Freezer 7 Pro gave gamers with Intel systems a chance to get a significant upgrade over their stock cooler for a throwaway price.
Designed for Intel’s LGA775 socket, it could be used to cool both last-gen Pentium 4 chips and new Core 2 Quad CPUs, and it could cope with a surprising amount of heat with its large, clip-on 92mm fan and copper heatpipes. Loads of other third-party air coolers have done the rounds before and since, many of them significantly better, but the Arctic Freezer 7 Pro stands out as the one that really made a difference to the most people when it came out, proving that you didn’t have to put up with a noisy Intel stock cooler even if you didn’t have a huge amount of money to spend.
20 Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090
On a mission to pull out all the stops and make the absolute fastest gaming GPU possible, the RTX 4090 basically proved that there was no upper limit when it comes to making a flagship product – even if your graphics card costs $1,599, it will still sell in big numbers if it’s genuinely awesome. The result was an absolute beast of a GPU, with a massive 24GB of VRAM, memory bandwidth that broke the 1TB/s barrier, and a huge count of 16,384 CUDA cores.
Meanwhile, Nvidia’s improvements to its RT cores made real-time ray tracing at 4K possible with decent frame rates, with the option to engage Nvidia’s new frame gen tech as well. It left its predecessor, the RTX 3090, well and truly in the dust. While the rest of the Ada launch lineup often had disappointing pricing and surprisingly low amounts of VRAM, the RTX 4090 was an incredible piece of gaming hardware.
Nvidia attempted to pull off the same feat with the RTX 5090 two years later, with 32GB of VRAM and even more hardware packed into the GPU. However, with a much higher price and only a modest improvement in rendering power, this power-hungry successor didn’t quite pull off the same magic, even if it is the best graphics card you can buy right now in terms of speed.
Read our full Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 review.
19 ATi Radeon 9700 Pro
Without much fanfare, ATi suddenly produced an astoundingly great gaming GPU in August 2002, beating Nvidia to make the first GPU with DirectX 9 shader hardware. In fact, Nvidia didn’t have an answer until it released the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra in March 2003, which wasn’t only slower than the 9700 Pro in most games, but also had a ridiculously noisy cooler, later nicknamed “the dustbuster” attached to it.
By this time, ATi had launched the new and improved Radeon 9800 Pro, with DDR2 memory and an even faster clock speed, and Nvidia simply had nothing to compete. The Radeon 9700 Pro has a curious spec by today’s standards, as it predates the days of unified shaders, where several stream processors (or CUDA cores in Nvidia speak) can work together to perform multiple rendering jobs. Instead, it has eight pixel pipelines and four vertex pipelines, compared to four and three respectively in the GeForce 5800 Ultra.
The Radeon 9700 Pro was ahead of its time, fast, and also thermally efficient, requiring only a single-slot cooler. Unreal Tournament 2003 ran great on the 9700 Pro, and it could even handle later games such as Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 remarkably well. ATi has since been bought by AMD, of course, and the company has been playing catch-up with Nvidia for many years now, but in 2002 the Radeon 9700 Pro had the latest tech and implemented it well, putting Nvidia on the backfoot until it launched its outstanding GeForce 6000 lineup a year later.
18 Nvidia nForce 4 SLI
It wasn’t that long ago that many companies made the chipsets for your motherboard, rather than just Intel and AMD. SiS, VIA, and ALi were all names you’d regularly see on your motherboard, and then Nvidia came along and put everyone else to shame. The company had already produced two of its nForce chipsets, introducing us to dual-channel SDRAM and a half-decent integrated GPU, but the company turned the market on its head with nForce4 SLI.
Not only was nForce4 SLI by far and away the fastest chipset if you wanted to build an AMD Athlon 64 system, but it also enabled you to link two graphics cards together in SLI configuration. Formerly standing for “scan line interleave” on the 3dfx Voodoo2, Nvidia changed its meaning to “scalable link interface” and it enabled you to combine the power of two graphics cards to get even more performance.
At this time, you needed identical graphics cards from the same manufacturer, plugged into two 16x PCIe slots, with a bridge connector linking the two cards at the top. It worked on top-end cards such as the GeForce 6800 Ultra, but also much cheaper cards such as the GeForce 6600 GT, giving you an upgrade path that didn’t involve getting rid of your existing card, while enabling you to get even faster performance at the top-end if you could afford it.
It wasn’t twice as fast as one card, of course, and there were also a load of compatibility problems – there’s a reason why Nvidia SLI is no longer an option, but at the time it offered a great way for gamers to get even more graphics performance if they were willing to put in the work.
17 Razer Deathadder
Nearly two decades after the first Deathadder snaked its way into gamers’ palms, this design is still going strong. The Deathadder wasn’t the first Razer gaming mouse – that title belongs to the now largely forgotten Boomslang – but it was the first to combine gaming features with comfort in a slick, premium design.
There were no pointy bits jutting into your hand in the name of gamer styling, and its gentle curves fitted perfectly in your hand, with all the buttons falling into just the right places for your fingers. Someone had actually thought about the shapes of people’s hands and designed a mouse that wasn’t just super-fast and responsive, with multiple buttons, but that was supremely comfortable to hold and swing round your mouse mat.
Ideal for both work and play, and for a variety of grip styles, the Deathadder has gently evolved into the product we still have today, and while the specs have changed, the core shape is still identifiable. Proving that gamers could have a well-designed premium mouse that was comfortable to hold, and still have gaming features, the Deathadder has been supremely influential on the design of gaming mice over the years, and I’m still very happily using a Deathadder V3 today all these years later.
Read our full Razer Deathadder V3 review.
16 Intel Pentium
Intel pulled off a work of marketing genius when it launched the first Pentium CPUs in 1993. Until that point, we’d used 8086, 286, 386, and then 486 CPUs, designed by Intel, but also made by AMD, Cyrix, and others as third-party manufacturers. Intel then decided to leave its partners to come up with their own chips, while it produced its own design with a unique brand name.
Importantly, every single Pentium CPU had an integrated floating point unit as standard, a feature that was soon seen on the system requirements stickers for big games such as Quake. The 486DX had already given us this feature, but at that point it was still a choice – now it was expected that CPUs would be able to handle decimal numbers well, and that left the competing Cyrix 5×86 and AMD K5 in a difficult position, with the former in particular having a very weak floating point unit.
Spanning all the way from the 60MHz Pentium to the final 233MHz Pentium MMX, this CPU practically quadrupled in performance during its lifespan. It soon became an essential for gamers, with the ability to render vastly improved 3D graphics, and with a 90MHz Pentium you could later equip your PC with a 3dfx Voodoo card too. The PC industry has never been the same again since, with AMD now having the upper hand when it comes to making the best gaming CPU.
15 Finalmouse Ultralight Pro
Finalmouse wasn’t the first company to fill a mouse shell full of holes, but the Ultralight Pro was the one that became the benchmark when it was unleashed in 2017. In a world where gaming mice used to come with a box of weights in the box that you could add to them, the Finalmouse Ultralight Pro showed that, in actuality, your first-person shooter skills could be substantially improved if you had a super lightweight mouse to swing around your mat.
With its honeycomb design not just covering the body of the mouse, but also the front two buttons, the Finalmouse Ultralight Pro weighed just 67g, while several gaming mice at the time weighed over 100g. That record has since been beaten several times since, of course, with the magnesium build of the Finalmouse Ultralight X models allowing for sub-40g weights while still being wireless, but it was this funny-looking mouse that changed the industry, to the point where practically every peripheral maker now has at least one lightweight mouse option, even if it isn’t always full of holes.
14 Corsair Hydro H100
With their built-in pump screens flashing up Hello Kitty GIFs, their glowing RGB fans, and often their huge radiators, the best AIO cooler designs today are regularly seen in today’s gaming PCs, but the PC cooling landscape used to look very different 15 years ago. Most people used a standard heatsink and fan setup, while the uber enthusiasts would build a custom water cooling loop with individual components – there was no middle ground.
Corsair had been dabbling with liquid cooling for a while by this time – I remember playing with its (not especially good) HydroCool 200 custom water-cooling kit all the way back in 2003, and other companies had produced closed-loop coolers with 120mm radiators as well. But in 2011, Corsair rightly spotted that there was potentially a big gap in the market for a mass-produced, easy-to-install water-cooling system with a full-size 240mm radiator.
That was ambitious in a time when many PC cases didn’t have 240mm mounts, but Corsair absolutely called it right, paving the way for a new standard in CPU cooling. Easy to install, guaranteed not to leak, and with a handy fan-control button in the middle of the pump, the Corsair H100 brought high-spec liquid cooling into the mainstream, setting a standard that continues today.
Corsair didn’t invent the closed-loop cooler, of course, and the H100 was actually made by Danish cooling firm Asetek – it wasn’t even the first 240mm AIO cooler, but it was this product that caught the attention of PC builders and PC gamers, making the high-end AIO cooler a mainstream product.
13 Hyte Y60
When you spend so much money on PC hardware bling with colored lights, flashy heatsinks, and sleeved cables, it seems a shame to hide it all away behind a solid case wall. From DIY plastic window kits in the early 2000s, to tempered glass panels in the 2010s, there have been various attempts to parade your computer’s inner workings in style, but the Hyte Y60 (and later the Y70) fish tank design, with three glass panels all round, has now become the baseline by which other glass-paneled cases are judged.
Building on the success of other cases, such as the awesome Lian Li 011D with its front and side glass panels, Hyte added a third panel between the front and side panes, giving the impression of a rounded aquarium, while parking the PSU in a separate chamber behind the motherboard. Cable nests could be hidden away, and PC components could be exhibited in their full glory, with all their lights shining through the panels.
A further touch of genius came when Hyte introduced a display kit for the Y60, enabling you to put whatever you want on a screen between the two glass panes – ideal if you wanted to make a themed build, where you could show off moving images on the large screen on the front, while still displaying your PC components through the other glass panels.
It’s all superfluous in terms of PC gaming performance, of course, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with spending more money on a product because it looks good.
Read our full Hyte Y70 Touch review.
12 Corsair K70
It’s testament to Corsair’s designers that I only retired my original Corsair K70 two months ago, after a massive 11 years in service, and even that was just so I could upgrade to the latest model. Built like a tank with its chunky metal top plate, and combining mechanical CherryMX keyswitches with a nifty volume roller (much better than a knob or buttons) and dedicated media controls, the K70 was a triumph of design. Unlike the K60 before it, the keycaps could also have LEDs shining through them, first with single colors and later with RGB lighting.
Corsair wasn’t the only company making mechanical gaming keyboards at this time, but the choice wasn’t huge, and the K70 stood head and shoulders above its competitors. With premium build quality, a choice of your preference of switches, and a superb design that catered for work and play, it’s been hard to improve on this design since. More keyswitches have emerged, as have programmable macro keys, screens, and features such as Razer SnapTap, but for most gamers, keyboard design pretty much peaked here – there’s a reason why Corsair is still making K70 keyboards today.
Read our full Corsair K70 Core review.
11 Xbox Wireless Controller
Gamepads used to be a bit of a lottery on the PC, with hugely different button layouts and features, and games often needing you to configure all the controls one by one. For a long time, there was also general snobbery toward game pads, which were considered the domain of console gamers, while real PC gamers used a keyboard and mouse, or a joystick for flight sims.
Then, when Windows 10 was released, Microsoft built support for the Xbox Wireless Controller directly into the operating system, whether it was connected via the wireless connection or a cable, and it would just work. Most new PC games now support this controller as standard, while third parties from PowerA to Razer make their controllers to the same pattern and standard. It helps that it’s also well designed, comfortable to hold, and keenly priced as well.
It might not be the best PC controller in every respect – the Sony DualSense arguably has a better design, for one – but the Microsoft Xbox Wireless Controller earns a place on this list by finally making it possible to play console games on the PC with a controller that just worked, without any hassle.
Read our full Xbox Wireless controller review.
10 Samsung 840 Evo
There’s a huge array of SSDs that could have had this slot, as plenty of solid state drives had been doing the rounds before this one came out, but Samsung absolutely knocked it out of the park with the Samsung 840 Evo and later 850 Evo. These drives struck exactly the right balance between price, performance, and capacity, persuading many PC gamers to finally upgrade from mechanical hard drives and enter the gloriously responsive solid-state world.
Firstly, Samsung absolutely nailed performance, using its new in-house 19nm TLC NAND flash memory and Samsung MEX controller (now running 33% faster than in the original 840), while doubling the amount of LPDDR2 cache compared to the previous 840 drives. Meanwhile, capacity was also massively improved, with a 1TB drive now available, and 120GB still being the starting point.
If you wanted even more performance, you could go for the more expensive 840 Pro, which Samsung also offered, but it was the 840 Evo that really made an impression, with its lower pricing and top performance.
9 AMD Athlon 64
After being seen as the underdog for several decades, AMD decided to take a massive shot at Intel in 2003, and it paid off big time. While Intel was still flailing around with the lamentable NetBurst architecture seen in the Pentium 4, AMD produced a high-performance, power-efficient chip architecture that put Intel’s contemporary chips to shame. Not only did it introduce the PC desktop to the world of 64-bit processors before Intel, but it also brought us an integrated memory controller embedded in the CPU, while Intel was still handing this work to the motherboard chipset.
Of course, we didn’t even have a 64-bit version of Windows at this point, and the benefits of the memory controller were also limited too, but AMD now had technological bragging rights. More importantly, the chips were also seriously fast when it came to the standard 32-bit code run on desktop PCs at the time, particularly in games, and they didn’t require the same level of cooling as Intel’s Pentium 4 chips either. AMD was even able to start charging large amounts of money for its top-end chips based on the AMD64 architecture, which used the FX brand.
The Athlon 64 had Intel soundly beaten, and the latter even ended up having to can its NetBurst architecture early and move its next-gen chips back to a refined version of the old P6 core it first introduced with the Pentium Pro years beforehand.
Read our full Intel Pentium 4 feature.
8 AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D
Cementing its place as the king of gaming CPUs right now, AMD took the acclaimed Ryzen 7 7800X3D and made it even better. Moving the massive 64MB slice of 3D V-cache to the underside of the chiplet, rather than on top of it, gave AMD enough thermal headroom to crank up the clock speed by an extra 200MHz, and even open the floodgates so you could overclock the 9800X3D further yourself.
With this extra clock speed, loads of cache, and some extra oomph added by the move to the new Zen 5 CPU architecture, all while sticking to a single eight-core chiplet, AMD nailed the gaming CPU formula with this chip. In fact, when it came out, the 9800X3D exceeded all sales expectations and was hard to find in stock for several weeks, but it’s now readily available for its MSRP of $479. It’s hard to make a CPU that stands out these days, but AMD managed it with the 9800X3D.
Read our full AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D review.
7 Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
Intel didn’t rest on its laurels after the Pentium 4 vs Athlon 64 fiasco, and quickly made the ultimate CPU of the moment. First came the Core 2 Duo range with two cores, but just a year later came the Core 2 Quad range, giving you four cores in one desktop CPU package for the first time. Importantly, you could even update the BIOS on your old Pentium 4 motherboard, if it was recent enough, and still drop one of these new chips into it. I did this with my old DFI Infinity 975X motherboard at the time, and the difference was transformative.
Several Core 2 Quad chips were made over the years, but one in particular proved to be very popular with enthusiasts, and that was the Core 2 Quad Q6600. Costing just $266 for a quad-core 2.4GHz chip, it gave you a cheap upgrade path from your Pentium 4 or Core 2 Duo system, and while it didn’t have an unlocked multiplier, I found it was was even possible to overclock to 3GHz it if you were prepared to adjust the front side bus speed and voltage yourself.
With Intel sticking to the quad-core formula for several of the next CPU generations, and AMD’s Bulldozer architecture being uncompetitive, many Core 2 Quad Q6600 owners stuck with their CPUs for years and years – I was still playing games on mine a good five years after it came out, and others stuck it out for much longer. Ahead of its time, and with a surprisingly low price, this was a truly great CPU.
6 Nvidia GeForce 256
Determined to well and truly put the boot into 3dfx, Nvidia completely transformed the PC graphics industry in 1999 when it brought out its first GeForce product, and coined the term “GPU” to describe a PC gaming graphics chip. While other 3D cards only accelerated some of the 3D graphics pipeline, including Nvidia’s previous Riva TNT cards, the GeForce 256 could basically do the whole lot, including the transform and lighting calculations that had previously been handled by the CPU.
Not only that, but with an immense amount of rendering power, 32MB of RAM, and the ability to play games with 32-bit color, the GeForce 256 made the 3dfx Voodoo3 look pretty weedy by comparison. It took a while for hardware transform and lighting to be incorporated into every PC game, but it was quickly becoming a standard by the time the delayed 3dfx Voodoo5 launched in 2000. In the meantime, Nvidia had added DDR memory to the GeForce 256 to make it even faster, and even brought out the new GeForce 2 lineup.
ATi followed suit with its own GPU, the first Radeon card, but other big players in the industry, including VideoLogic and 3dfx, ignored this change in 3D graphics until it was too late. Nvidia hasn’t looked back since – we all now talk about GPUs as if that’s what they’ve always been called, and Nvidia is a household name.
Read our full Nvidia GeForce 256 feature.
5 Creative Sound Blaster Pro
As with gaming graphics, PC audio was a bit of an afterthought for the PC. The original PC sound system was a single speaker that could only make a horrible monophonic beep that sounded like an old telephone. You could force it to play very low-resolution sampled sounds, but they had serious input lag problems in games. Meanwhile, the consoles and home computers had significantly more advanced synthesizer music and realistic gunfire.
Improving PC gaming sound was a gradual process, with one of the first standards being the Ad-Lib card – a synthesizer chip on an 8-bit ISA card that could play back sequences, but which had no way to play digitized audio. I had one when I bought Doom, and the music sounded great, but all the gunfire and demon growls had to be routed to the PC speaker on my system, meaning they all sounded like bizarre chirpy beep noises.
There were several attempts to combine sampled audio with a synthesizer on one card, but the one that became the standard was the Creative Sound Blaster Pro. Its onboard synthesizer could play music in games, and it was Ad-Lib compatible too. Meanwhile, its ability to play and record 8-bit samples meant you also got human voices and proper sound effects in games. PC gaming audio was finally good. Future sound cards were marketed as being Sound Blaster Pro compatible, and a standard was born.
Later gaming sound cards did an even better job, of course, giving us 16-bit, then 24-bit audio, as well as more advanced wavetable synthesizers, but it was the Sound Blaster Pro that really stopped PC gaming audio from being obviously flawed.
4 Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060
The fact that this nearly nine-year-old GPU is still in the top 12 graphics cards in the latest Steam Survey, despite having no ray tracing or AI hardware, really demonstrates its popularity. Offering just the right product for the time, and at a surprisingly generous price, the GTX 1060 is still a standard baseline after all these years. Even now, you’ll still find it in the Tempest Rising system requirements, for example, and game developers still target this GPU for their minimum specs.
I’ve picked out the GTX 1060 here, but practically every 1000-series Pascal GPU in this era was a contender for this list in its own right. At least two people on the PixelArena.io team only finally gave up their GTX 1080 Ti cards in the last year or so, and the GTX 1070 was a fantastic mid-range card too. This period was a great time to buy a PC graphics card, with good-value pricing, loads of rendering power, and power-efficient operation too.
Back to the GTX 1060, two versions were available, with 3GB or 6GB of memory, with the former being cheaper and having fewer CUDA cores. With a price of just $199, though, that 3GB card was very appealing for the game rendering power on offer, while the 6GB card still offered great value for $249. Based on the supremely powerful and efficient Pascal architecture, the GTX 1060 could max out the settings of pretty much any game at the time at 1,920 x 1,080, and even run some games at 2,560 x 1,440 with high detail.
Wouldn’t it be great if Nvidia made a $199 GPU that could deliver so much gaming power to the masses again?
Read our full Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 review.
3 VGA
Believe it or not, the PC was once one of the worst systems around for gaming graphics. In fact, many first-generation PCs were text-only, while the first CGA graphics cards could only display four colors, usually in a horrific-looking palette, at 320 x 200 (or more colors in a smudgy-looking composite mode, if you had the right gear).
Later, EGA graphics offered a slight improvement, usually with 16 colors, but it wasn’t until VGA (video graphic array) came along that PC games could properly rival the graphics seen on the Commodore Amiga and 16-bit games consoles, with the standard ability to display 256 colors at 320 x 240 and 16 at 640 x 480 (for the pedants, yes, different configurations were available, depending on the VRAM available). You can see the massive difference in the comparative Wing Commander screenshots above.
Suddenly, grass was green, skies were blue, Ferraris were red, and there were even gradients of colors for shading. Even then, the PC wasn’t really seen as a games machine, and VGA cards cost an obscene amount of money, but soon it became the standard across the board, turning the PC into a full-color gaming rig that could also handle all your business needs. Even now, you can still find 15-pin VGA sockets on some monitors and projectors.
2 Valve Steam Deck
With its slick operating system, surprisingly potent hardware, and mammoth games catalog, the Steam Deck has transformed the PC gaming industry in the space of just a few years, inspiring a raft of copycats. Enabling you to battle through Baldur’s Gate 3 on the train, or simply play a round of Balatro while you’re in bed, the Steam Deck has brought PC gaming to new places.
It’s had a profound impact on the industry. As well as wanting the latest games to run on our desktop rigs with all the bells and whistles, we also now want them to run at a respectable frame rate on the best gaming handheld out there, and publishers are expected to confirm if their new games are Steam Deck verified, or at least playable.
Building the Steam Deck took Valve a massive amount of work, from designing the comfortable-to-hold, well-built chassis, to getting an enormous number of Windows games to work smoothly on its Linux-based OS. Windows-based competitors such as the Asus ROG Ally and MSI Claw have tried to grab some of its space with more powerful hardware, but the Steam Deck is still the best in terms of user experience.
Read our full Steam Deck review, as well as our Steam Deck OLED review.
1 3dfx Voodoo
Although it wasn’t the first 3D accelerator, it was the 3dfx Voodoo that really forced PC gaming to accept 3D graphics properly. Designed as a pure 3D card, it was designed to hook up to the display output of your existing 2D graphics card, via a VGA loopback cable at the back, and it then turned any supporting games from a slow, garish, pixelated mess into breathtaking graphical spectacles with gloriously smooth motion.
In all my time as a PC gamer, I don’t think I’ve ever seen quite the same jump in gaming graphics since. Ray tracing comes close, as did the first GPUs with shaders, but that leap from CPU software rendering to full hardware 3D rendering was just astounding at the time. It didn’t matter that the maximum resolution was only 640 x 480, and you only had 16-bit color, as it was just so much better than anything we’d seen before. Quake 2, Jedi Knight, Wipeout 2097, Forsaken – so many games now looked amazing on your PC.
Unlike rivals, such as PowerVR, which required an expensive MMX CPU, you only needed a 90MHz Pentium to run a 3dfx Voodoo card (I actually ran mine on a 75MHz Pentium without any trouble). 3dfx even had its open API, called GLide, which gave you gorgeous reflective surfaces in Unreal if you enabled it. 3dfx followed it up with several new Voodoo cards, before eventually being swallowed up by Nvidia, but it’s that first Voodoo card that made all the difference at the start.
Read our full 3dfx Voodoo feature.
Honorable mentions
I originally thought I’d struggle to find 25 products to put in this list, but in truth, the PC has had so many cool pieces of hardware in its lifetime that you could easily make this list a top 100, especially if you included monitors and laptops as well. I’ve undoubtedly missed a few of your favorites, but here are a few of the ones that nearly made the cut, but didn’t quite make it:
Logitech G502, AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT, Samsung 970 Evo, Microsoft Sidewinder, Corsair Dominator, Chieftec Dragon, Microsoft Intellimouse, Sound Blaster AWE64, AMD K62, Nvidia GeForce 3, Intel Sandy Bridge, Roland MT-32, Nvidia GeForce 6800 GT, Ad-Lib Gold, Lian Li 011D.
And that brings me to the end of my rundown of the best PC components ever. If there are any parts you think I missed, then you can discuss this feature with members of the team and fellow readers in our community Discord server. You can also follow us on Google News for daily PC games news, reviews, and guides.