Prime Day came and went, and this morning I almost wept when checking out what gaming PC prices are like right now: it's far from pretty. But this absolute trooper of an RTX 5070 machine is still hanging in there at an eminently reasonable price of $1,400 at Newegg. It's been at this price for quite some time, and is somehow still holding out against the memory crisis storm.
Admittedly, that's a little easier when you're only rockin' 16 GB of memory in what looks like a single DIMM slot, but at least that's fast DDR5 memory. For this price with an RTX 5070, I'll take it.
We weren't too keen on the RTX 5070 at launch, but that was all relative to its pricing and the pricing of its competitors. The picture now is a lot different, and especially when it comes to pre-built gaming PCs, RTX 5070 rigs can often offer some of the best bang for your buck.
With the 5070, you're getting something capable of achieving playable frame rates in most new games at 1440p, even without frame gen and upscaling. And with the latter enabled, you can expect frame rates decent enough to even make good use of a high refresh rate monitor in all but very demanding games.
That's what's on offer here, and it makes it worth the sacrifices you're making when it comes to RAM and CPU. The former will do just fine powering the RTX 5070 for gaming, though you'll have to go steady with background apps and not expect too much outside of gaming—for, say, multitasking or productivity tasks. The latter is a previous-gen budget processor, but again, it will do just fine for gaming.
All this being said, there are a couple of alternatives if you're not keen on the single 16 GB stick of RAM.
Alternatives
The first of these will obviously not perform as well as the RTX 5070 rig. And the caveat here is DDR4 rather than DDR5 RAM, which not only performs a little worse but importantly, you lose out on some longevity, because you'll have to ditch that RAM if you want to switch to a new processor down the line. But for now, it's fine for gaming, and actually gives you more wriggle room for multitasking (for instance) than 16 GB of DDR5.
The second option with the RTX 5060 Ti is actually more expensive than the RTX 5070 option, and it won't perform as well in games because the GPU is less performant. But for that compromise you're getting a better CPU and, more importantly, a full 32 GB of fast DDR5 RAM. That means no compromises on the memory front at all, either for performance or longevity. Which is not something to turn our noses up at during a global memory shortage.
For my money, I'd be tempted to go for that last option, to be honest, but I only really play Counter-Strike at the moment, which is more CPU-intensive than GPU-intensive. If I were wanting to play more graphically intensive games, though, I'd be opting for the RTX 5070 rig if I could afford it. And if both are out of budget, there's the RTX 5060 option.
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