In keeping up with our end of the year coverage, such as The Best CPUs of 2017, The Best PC Cases of 2017, and Best RAM sales, we’ve now put together the most noteworthy gaming monitors of the year. Monitors aren’t something we’ve spent much time with this year, although there are a couple we’ve gotten hands-on with and recommend. As the holidays approach—and thus, the most consumer-centric time of the year—we hope this guide of top-rated monitors will help take some of the guesswork out of any purchasing decisions.

We’ll look at best monitors in categories such as UltraWide, 4K gaming, budget 1080p, 1440p, G-Sync, FreeSync, and a handful of honorable mentions. This list includes Black Friday and other sales for monitors.

NVidia's aggressive $650 price-point for the new GTX 980 Ti ensures that a build centered around it is more of a reasonable goal rather than a pipe dream. 

This $1747 GTX 980 Ti gaming PC build is versatile, with the ability to tackle a variety of high-end gaming experiences. It's useful to think of the build in terms of what monitor will be paired with it, as both 1080p and 1440p G-Sync up to 120Hz are functional pairings. 1080p at Ultra settings and 1440p at High or Ultra (depending on the game) are both achievable on the 980 Ti; as we learned recently, the 980 Ti performs almost as well as the Titan X for a significantly lower price. This build aims to take advantage of that price with a system that does such a powerful card justice while looking badass.

This PC build will easily play The Witcher 3, GTA V, and other modern, high-graphics quality games.

NVidia's latest addition to the Titan family diverges from its predecessors' market objectives. Previous Titan cards were fully double-precision enabled, ensuring marketability as affordable production and simulation cards that, by nature, also served reasonably as gaming cards. Because double-precision is detrimental to gaming performance, the original Titan and current Titan Z can be set to “single-precision mode” to better game, but aren't targeted as the “best gaming video card” out there. The Titan X is; in fact, that's exactly what nVidia calls it – the best single-GPU on the market. The selection of these words is intentional, ruling-out dual-GPU single cards (like the 295X2 or 690) and multi-card configurations (like what we're testing today).

Because the Titan X is heavily marketed as a gaming solution, something reinforced by offering just 1/32 of SP in DP performance, we decided to perform a value comparison between 2xGTX 980s in SLI. The SLI configuration offers indisputably powerful raw computational output, but has a smaller memory capacity than the Titan X's 12GB single-GPU pool.

Recently, the monitor industry has amusingly reminded me of laundry detergent. It seems like everybody is coming out with detergents that are four times as potent, and the monitor industry isn't too different in its marketing language. With the rising popularity of 4K, it's just a matter of time until the norm is to have a monitor with four times as many pixels as a 1080p screen.

The normalization of 4k monitors is certainly very exciting, but current-gen GPUs still struggle with playing games at such a high resolution. Similarly, prices for 4K monitors may be dropping, but are still high for the average gamer. Luckily, 2560x1440 screens are a reasonable compromise between performance, pixels, and price.

This round-up looks at some of the best 1440p displays on the market, particularly with a focus on gaming needs.

Elite: Dangerous is one of the best-optimized games we've tested this year, right up there with GRID: Autosport. The game is a member of the impending cluster of space sim and space-flight combat games actively being developed. Like Star Citizen, Elite: Dangerous comes from the designers of a game that's decades-old, 1984's “Elite.”

With Elite: Dangerous' official launch, we've put the game on our GPU bench to test the FPS on various graphics card configurations, including an R7 250X, 270X, GTX 750 Ti, GTX 980, and more. In addition to our usual video settings tests, we ran Elite: Dangerous using AMD's VSR and nVidia's DSR (super resolution) to render output at 4K. These tests are representative of performance yield on a true 4K display. Our crash fix guide may be useful to those who are experiencing issues running Elite: Dangerous.

ASUS announced the latest additions to their monitor line-up at CES 2014 today -- the ROG Swift PG278Q Premium Gaming Monitor and the PB287Q 4K Monitor.