ABS Cyclone Ruby Gaming PC review

In the great police line-up that is buying a new gaming PC, a case can tell you a lot about the criminal tendencies—or otherwise—of the particular collection of cagey components in front of you. Peering through the one-way glass at a motley assemblage of metal and plastic parts, your task is to pick out the one capable of projecting the most brutality and ferocity, the one that should be taken away in cardboard and incarcerated at your pleasure.

Which is a long-winded way of saying you can’t judge a book by its cover. The ABS Cyclone Ruby is absolutely identical to the ABS Cyclone Aqua, from the outside. Even the CPU heat sinks and fans are interchangeable between the two, as they’re Thermaltake UX200 ARGB tower air coolers capable of being mounted on AM5 or LGA1700 motherboards.

They have fans in the same places, the cables are neatly tucked out of the way, and a lot of the Ruby’s internal parts have the word ‘Gigabyte’ on them, just like in the ABS Cyclone Aqua. The motherboard is a Gigabyte B650M-C Wifi, the GPU a Gigabyte RTX 4070 Super Windforce 3X OC. The PSU is the same 650W model. They’re practically twins.

What’s different is that the Ruby is red, in CPU terms at least, with an AMD Ryzen 7 7700X in place of the Aqua’s Core i7 14700F. That’s a big difference, as the 7700X is an eight-core chip, while the 14700F has 20 when you mix P and E cores together. Those little E cores may not be pulling the same amount of weight as their P siblings, but they’re like ants when you get a lot of them together, and you wouldn’t want them overrunning your picnic and stealing your sandwiches.

And this shows in the very first test I run on the Ruby, 3D Mark’s Time Spy Extreme. The Ruby’s RTX 4070 Super beats the RTX 4060Ti in the Aqua in exactly the way you’d expect, but the Ryzen CPU manages just under half the score of the i7. I was very impressed with the Intel chip, so this isn’t to say that the 7700X is a poor processor, and it’s from 2022 against the 14700F’s 2024 release date so it’s maybe not really a fair comparison, but the 7700X has always been a strong gaming option.

In the Cinebench benchmark test, which has been known to reduce CPUs to pools of quivering jelly, it beats the i9-13900K (and H), Ultra 7 258V and Snapdragon X Plus in single-core performance, while coming in slightly lower than the i7 14700F. It’s really not that far off the pace.

Overclocking is turned off in the Ruby’s BIOS, so if you activate it Ryzen Master may be able to squeeze out a few more cycles for you as long as the cooler can keep up. If I could transplant the RTX 4070 Super into the Aqua I’d have the best of both worlds, but apparently I’m not allowed to do that, but you could with an ABS configuration page. You might expect a CPU sold with a hotter GPU to be of a similar power level, but that’s not the case here.

Speaking of cases, there's little to complain about in ABS’s choice of container. It’s a good looking, if plain, compact (200mm x 415mm x 321mm) black rectangle that has a single glass side panel so you can see the RGB fans spinning. The RAM—from Teamgroup and both fast and plentiful—lights up too, and while you have a degree of control through the Gigabyte software you’ll have to live with the case fans being on all the time.

The Ruby suffers slightly from a lack of I/O—there's only one really fast USB-C port and it’s not a Thunderbolt, though there's enough that a hub or two should satisfy even the most enthusiastic peripheral enjoyer and the top-mounted Type-A ports are easy to access. Only having Wi-Fi 5, and a last-gen version of Bluetooth, may prove a greater bottleneck, though we’re well into diminishing returns regarding Wi-Fi speeds compared to average internet connection bandwidth, so perhaps it’s good enough. You can always stick an Ethernet cable into the gigabit port, which is often a better idea with a static desktop PC anyway.

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Aside from the Aqua, the obvious point of comparison for the Ruby is with the iBuyPower RDY Y40 Valorant VCTA R003, which shares the same basic spec but has slightly slower RAM. The TIme Spy results are broadly similar, with the Ruby just edging it but not by much. Oddly, the Ruby’s SSD, which is the same Kingston drive as in the Aqua, does much worse in testing than both the Aqua and particularly the Valorant’s WD Blue. There's a 180 MB/s difference in average bandwidth between them, which has to be significant and will manifest in slightly longer load times.

And then of course there are the games. The RTX 4070 Super is an excellent 1440p card, and hasn’t stopped working following the launch of the 5-series GPUs despite what many people expected. The card in this PC runs nice and cool, and comes close to the Radeon RX 7900 XT in non ray-traced games. In Cyberpunk 2077 it does beautifully, supplying a minimum of 60 fps at ray-tracing medium, 1440p settings with DLSS quality mode and frame-gen enabled, and it can bounce through 1440p Black Myth: Wukong at above 60 fps with frame-gen and ray-tracing both switched off but DLSS on.

The combo of 7700X and RTX 4070 Super is an ideal one for 1440p gaming, and if you’re able to get it at a discount—ABS PCs are often on offer and the company does a neat line in refurbs, too—then all the better. You are able to get RTX 5070-powered machines for around that price if you're lucky, and while they won't deliver a ton more performance will get you access to Multi Frame Gen and DLSS 4.

The Cyclone Ruby is not a colossus that bestrides the PC gaming world, terrorising all in its traced path with 4K frame rates and Thunderbolts, but it is a well built and performant PC that offers a lot of game for the money when you can find it on sale, but is rather too pricey when it's not.

ABS Refurbished PCS
The pain of stock issues and tariffs, and punitive pricing for GPUs means that a full PC might just be your best chance of getting decent hardware at a decent price. We've checked out a pair of ABS gaming PCs on its Refurbished line, to see how they fare as a way to potentially save some more cash. The refurbs are all checked over as returns and any failed components are replaced from its normal stock, and each machine is tested three times during the process. They are then stress-tested using the same process as all new ABS gaming PCs.