NZXT Player Three Prime review

Resting on this desk is a behemoth: A classy, matte white box containing such ludicrous hardware that it answers all questions of its capabilities before they're asked. Yes, it can.

The NZXT Player Three Prime scoffs at compromise and laughs in the face of benchmarks, outperforming or matching top-performing machines in recent history. And you would darn well hope so, considering the asking price. Oof, the price.

The Player Three line begins at an eye-watering $3,149 with an RTX 5080 and Core Ultra 7 265KF, but this Player Three Prime trades up to an RTX 5090 and Ryzen 7 9800X3D for $4,999.

It's a number that's, unfortunately, gone up considerably since I first booted the Player Three Prime in October. With the price of RAM and storage skyrocketing, the 64 GB of DDR5-6000 and 4 TB NVMe within have become prized artifacts, resulting in a price tag for a gaming PC that's hauntingly close to the valuation of my 2015 Nissan Versa.

The grim reality of PC gaming economics in 2025 inherently limits who can or should be considering a prebuilt of this stature, but at least what you're buying is a turnkey solution to running any game you please as fast and effortlessly as can be achieved in 2025 (especially if you're gaming at 1440p). Unfortunately, you won't find a better deal by building this machine piecemeal for approximately $5,800—that is, unless you already have the RAM lying around to offset its $760 going price as of December 2025.

Against other RTX 5090 machines we've tested, such as the Intel-powered Alienware Area 51 Dave reviewed in July (currently going for a few hundred bucks more), the Player Three Prime matches and often exceeds in our gaming gauntlet. Watching the Player Three Prime absolutely demolish Avatar: Frontiers of Pandra—a game that made my poor, aging RTX 2080 Super crave death back in 2023—with a 146 fps average (zero upscaling) is enough to make you believe miracles are possible. And its gains over the Alienware is in large part thanks to the 9800X3D chip, still our reigning champ as the best CPU for gaming.

It's a gaming-first chip (really gaming-only chip) whose 3D V-Cache gives it an upper hand in the CPU-intensive Baldur's Gate 3, but consistent with other machines packing the 9800X3D, those gains in gaming performance don't translate to professional productivity use. Given the resolutely eight-core nature of the processor, 3D rendering and such is not the chip's strong suit in comparison with other many core CPUs.

In thermal tests, the Player Three Prime aligned with similar machines. As expected, that 5090 runs hotter than less powerful cards, but NZXT's setup does a good job of cooling hardware that should be capable of heating a small home to the point that I barely register its presence in my enclosed office. It's also significantly quieter than other machines I've owned—it certainly hums, but it's a comfortable hum more akin to a distant refrigerator than a rattly floor fan.

And I don't hate looking at the machine doing all the work either, which is more than I can say as a past owner of numerous prebuilts laced with gaudy LED trim and sharp "gamer" accents. The Player Three Prime comes stock with the 2023 edition of NZXT's H9 Flow case in white. It's a quality tower with a half-glass front window and a glass side panel that comes off with a single thumbscrew. That's ditto for the metal mesh side.

LEDs line the circumference of six out of seven total fans, and other than the RGB glow of two Teamgroup RAM sticks, it's the only accent lighting in the machine. The included NZXT Cam software makes it easy to switch up the colors at a per-fan level, but I keep coming back to the cool white of the default configuration. It's a comforting, understated glow that's immediately attractive without screaming "look at me." This sort of light work that highlights individual components, rather than arbitrarily strewn lights along the inside edges, simply looks better.

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My only case gripe is that I couldn't immediately locate the PSU in this thing. That's because, as our review at the time also noted, the H9 has the PSU mounted in the middle of the back panel behind the motherboard, which adds some fuss when you wanna access the board from the mesh panel. Presumably that's less of a big deal for prebuilt buyers who have chosen this path for plug-and-play convenience, and it's not like the Player Three Prime needs any upgrades in the immediate future, but it's certainly a choice.

At least that neat and tidy back chamber isn't tied down in a way that modifications would be hell. NZXT's tidy cable management is largely accomplished with velcro straps and minimal cable ties, but you can't really do anything until you remove the large SSD bracket (a quick two screws, conveniently labeled).

The benefit of the H9's PSU placement in that back chamber is that all the cable-heavy components are tucked behind a metal wall, leaving a spacious front chamber that, even with the gargantuan 5090 protruding from its center, gives the Player Three Prime a minimal, pleasing interior. You get beauty in the front—the GPU, cool white fans, and LED temp monitor—and business in the back.

While the Player Three Prime's price is technically "right" in our hellish PC landscape, NZXT didn't source every one of its components from the very top shelf. That 4TB WD Blue SN5000—while spacious enough to accommodate my chonky Fall 2025 rotation of Battlefield 6, Baldur's Gate 3, Call of Duty, Arc Raiders, Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, and dozens of other smaller games—is a slow PCIe 4.0 drive that doesn't utilize the PCIe 5.0 socket on the motherboard. It's a solid enough SSD, but there are quicker PCIe 4.0 drives, and much faster PCIe 5.0 SSDs. The machine still boots fast enough that I can't complain, but it does stick out in a machine with money-no-object sensibilities.

As does the motherboard itself: The Gigabyte B650 Aorus Elite AX V2 is the latest iteration of a good mid-range board, but it's limited to PCIe 4.0 and WiFi 6E. It's a last-gen AMD minastream chipset that doesn't have all the modern feature finery. That's perfectly okay for my use, but it's not the sort of supporting hardware that says "$5,000 PC."

The BIOS was also a few versions behind when I first received it, and if you're playing the latest multiplayer shooters that require Secure Boot, you'll have to activate that manually as well or get the door slammed in your face.

At least the board is packed to the nosebleeds with USB ports: 5x USB 3.2 Gen 1, 2x USB 3.2 Gen 2, 4x USB 2.0, and a single USB-C 10 GB/s. What people could possibly need to plug into that many ports at once is none of my business, but I'll take the room.

Still, those quibbles are hard to hold onto when I actually fire up games on this machine and get nothing short of an excellent experience. That is the power of dropping a serious pile of cheddar on the best CPU and GPU of the moment: the Player Three Prime flies, and it looks good doing it.

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