PC gaming hardware may be in a bit of a tumultuous place. Companies like AMD are reportedly planning a GPU price hike soon, and chip shortages have made the price of memory skyrocket.
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Starting from the top, that 16 GB GPU is a powerful one, with much improved ray tracing performance over previous generations of AMD cards, and has decent overclocking headroom to squeeze out even more oomph. Even without overclocking, this is a strong card for 1440p gaming (or even 4K with a light upscaling boost).
FSR4 is looking mighty impressive right now, and though it's not quite as impressive as Nvidia's DLSS 4 technology, we found the card's raw performance is comparable to the more expensive RTX 5070 Ti in our tests.
Moving on from here, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D is not only the best AMD CPU right now, but the absolutely top-of-the-line CPU for any gaming rig. Packing eight cores, 16 threads, and a boost clock of 5.2 GHz, it boasts similar stats to plenty of other Zen 5 Ryzen 7 processors.
However, it comes with extra L3 cache and some power profile changes to get a bit more juice out of it. In practice, this results in a chip that can get the absolute most out of a gaming rig, though it lags behind others in productivity suites.
Rounding out this dream spec sheet for a Team Red build is 32 GB of DDR5 RAM and a 2 TB SSD. Both of these will become more expensive as time goes on, thanks to the rampant demands of AI, but they're not bringing the price of this rig up majorly now. The memory is rated at 5200 MT/s, and while that's not the fastest stuff out there, both will be competent for any games you want to throw at them.
With a 750 W PSU, you won't be throwing an RTX 5090 or anything in this rig without an upgrade, but an RTX 5090 will cost you more than the entire setup, and I wouldn't be upgrading this for at least another four or five years anyway. The 1-year warranty from Best Buy is a tad short, but that's the only real downside I can think of if you're looking for this GPU/CPU combo.
The case itself is pretty middle-of-the-pile, as far as gaming PCs go. It has three RGB fans at the front that give the black chassis a shine, but it's a tad on the safe side overall. It also comes with a gaming mouse and a keyboard, though as is the case with prebuilts, I don't hold much hope that they're any good.
In our experience, they've usually just been thrown into a closet and never touched again. Still, they'll work fine until you get something better if you're starting from scratch. At this price point, though, that mouse and keyboard are more or less freebies, even if the mental image of enjoying 1440p/4K gaming on a plasticky membrane keyboard gives me a chuckle.
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