The October Prime Day sales might be over but our benevolent system builders and retailers have kept some carrots around for us hungry rabbits to chase. And some of them are still surprisingly juicy, even compared to last week's discounts.
In particular, I'm struck by gaming PCs around the $1,500 mark. We have an RTX 5070 Ti build for $1,499 at Walmart and an RX 9070 XT for $1,520 at Newegg. That means that whether you're an AMD or Nvidia fan you should be able to get into some mid-to-high-end gaming for around this price point.
I've heard some say that these GPUs aren't truly high-end, but I think that's weighting the market a little unfairly. They are at the very least broaching high-end territory—that doesn't have to be the preserve of just the XX90 and XX80 cards. And combined with the other components in these two builds, I think we're getting some pretty powerful rigs.
Quick links
- Acer Nitro 60 | RTX 5070 Ti - $1,499 @ Walmart
- iBuyPower Slate 9 | RX 9070 XT - $1,520 @ Newegg
The deals
At the risk of being called an Nvidia shill, this is the build many will probably go for simply to be on the green side of the aisle. And that's okay, because there are genuine benefits to sitting pretty with Nvidia. Most notably, you get Multi Frame Gen (MFG), which should work best in titles that render natively at 60 fps or above—lower than this and the added latency might be annoying.
The RTX 5070 Ti is a great high-end (yes, high-end, not mid-range) graphics card that can demolish titles at 1440p and can even manage plenty of games at 4K. All the more if you enable upscaling and frame gen, of course. That's paired with a Core i7 14700F, a CPU with eight Performance cores that's more than capable of keeping that GPU fed with data.
You're also getting double the storage of the iBuyPower PC below, too, which is no small thing in 2025 when game stalls are so big. 2 TB is an ideal amount of storage today, especially if you're going to be using your PC for more than just gaming.
So why go for this one? After all, the RX 9070 XT isn't quite as good as the RTX 5070 Ti overall, trailing slightly on average. Well, it's not unreasonable to prefer the AMD build, for a couple of reasons.
First, AMD's upscaling is actually decent now thanks to FSR 4, in the games that support it at least. Second, some games do perform better on AMD GPUs than Nvidia ones. And third, you're getting an X3D chip in the form of the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D. This was the previous best CPU for gaming before its successor, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, and it's still far better for gaming than non-X3D ones today.
Despite this, you are paying a little extra for what's likely to be slightly worse performance overall with this build, so unless you're a big AMD fan, I'd say base your decision on how much you desire that X3D CPU, combined with which games you'll be playing. If you like games like The Talos Principle or Warhammer III, for instance, the AMD card will be better, but for gaming in general the RTX 5070 Ti build above might be a better bet.
1. Best overall:
HP Omen 35L
2. Best budget:
Lenovo Legion Tower 5i
3. Best high-end:
Corsair Vengeance A7500
4. Best compact:
Velocity Micro Raptor ES40
5. Alienware:
Alienware Area-51
6. Best mini PC:
Minisforum AtomMan G7 PT
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