I build loads of gaming PCs and this is the first to make me regret my decisions with my own personal rig—here's what you need to build it yourself

Image 1 of 6

Arctic's Xtender PC case on a white desk with various parts being installed to build a functional gaming PC. — (Image credit: Future)

We're headed to the Arctic for this PC build. Figuratively, since a trip to the Arctic is out of PC Gamer's budget, and I've only stuck some Arctic parts into a PC and called it a day. Less risk of hypothermia, though my components are perfectly chilly.

The Arctic Xtender case is the star of the show here. The cooling company's first case and I dare say a good one. Confusingly for a company famed for its CPU coolers, it focuses on looks, rather than pure cooling ability. Needless to say, it looks absolutely superb under the heavily-tinted mirrored glass surrounding its fishtank-style exterior. It looks so good, in fact, I'm starting to question why I opted for a white build rather than this dashing, icy look.

As for the rest, I've opted for an AMD Ryzen 7 9700X here, in combination with 32 GB of DDR5-6000 RAM from Corsair. Standard, but dependable. Then I've topped it off with an RTX 5080 Founders Edition. That's a sleek card that fits the clean-cut aesthetic throughout.

One thing: RAM prices have shot up in recent weeks, and prices are continuing to climb upwards by the day. It's not a great time to buy memory, but there are often deals on other components used in this build to try and cancel out some of that price increase, though not entirely.

Performance

We put every build through its paces, testing the latest games and putting the CPU under pressure to ensure stability.

Swipe to scroll horizontally

Header Cell - Column 0	Issue 416 \| RTX 5080 \| Ryzen 7 9700X	Issue 415 \| RTX 5070 \| Ryzen 9 9900X
Cinebench R24 \| single-thread (index score)	131	132
Cinebench R24 \| multithread (index score)	948	1676
3DMark Time Spy Extreme (index score)	13231	10507
3DMark Speed Way (index score)	8990	5890
Cyberpunk 2077 \| RT Medium \| 1440p (average fps)	83	53
Cyberpunk 2077 \| RT Medium \| 1440p (1% low fps)	65	46
Max CPU temp (°C)	63	80
Max GPU temp (°C)	62	65

TOPICS

Jacob earned his first byline writing for his own tech blog, before graduating into breaking things professionally at PCGamesN. Now he's managing editor of the hardware team at PC Gamer, and you'll usually find him testing the latest components or building a gaming PC.