The 25 best PC gaming hardware components ever, ranked

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.