What is the best gaming PC on the face of the earth? Because if I'm going to get a PC, it better be worth my damn while.
There is no best Gaming PC. Let me put it that way. PCs vary, and I mean, A LOT. It's depending what you want to do. Mainly Game? Or also Render videos or livestream.
I am not an expert but...............most pc gamers say build it yourself. Buying custom PC's are expensive. www.pcpartpicker.com can help with picking out compatible parts. Good Luck!
More expensive, to a point, means better. It very much depends on what you want and need. For example the GTX Titan is not a full gaming card. It's $1000, yes, but it has double-precision rendering blocks and a far more powerful CUDA technology compute ability than the rest of the Kepler series, which basically removed most of this ability from their GPUs after Fermi cards. The GTX 780Ti will do FAR better in gaming than a Titan, but won't even come close to the render power. Of course, where rendering is concerned, an AMD GPU is your best bet. Their OpenCL abilities are second to none for the gaming lineup of cards, unless you wish to buy an nVidia Quadro or AMD FirePro series card. Then you have to look at the other features present. AMD is cheaper, but draws more power and runs hotter and louder, even with aftermarket cooling setups. However an AMD R9 290X often found at $550 USD or so will far outclass the GTX 780 you find for the same $500-550 in terms of raw gaming power. But then you look at the nVidia cards having often better driver support, a better 3D vision capability, the inclusion of PhysX, running cooler and quieter. But is that worth the price to you? Remember AMD cards have the better triple monitor support using eyefinity and their TrueAudio as well, so by going to nVidia's side you forfeit this. Then you could look at one or two cards... CrossfireX is supported in less games and only works when games are fullscreened... but SLI usually has better support and performance scaling and works in windowed mode and is force-able on programs that normally don't use it, such as Skyrim's ENB/RCRN mods + the SKSE loader. Then we have AMD's mantle to take into account, where games which use it can theoretically get far better performance than throwing a ton of processing muscle at the game. There's a lot of things you can take into account. And I haven't even started talking about motherboard variances between Intel and AMD or their CPU pros and cons. In general, for a gaming PC with raw gaming power, the most powerful machine you could buy right now is an intel i7-4960X (and overclock it later) with four GTX 780Ti video cards and about 16GB DDR3 2400MHz RAM (though it's nearly impossible to use more than 8GB for most people). But that isn't cost effective nor the best solution for most people at all. Even when considering PC streaming, it's more feasible to buy a lesser powerful gaming machine and a capture card and use a streaming PC with a stronger CPU and far weaker GPU, so that the performance hits are more than negligible. ------------------------------------------------------------------ TL;DR? - In short, you find what you really want and decide what's the best parts to get for your needs.