I have a soft spot for the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX. This AMD GPU has been with us for almost two years and still makes for one of the best graphics cards for gaming. No refreshed model needed, either, just an occasional boost in performance thanks to driver updates.
This Cooler Master TD5 Pro is a good demonstration of the 7900 XTX's market power. We're talking about a bona fide high-end gaming PC for sub-$2,000, here, while competing RTX 4080 Super builds sit firmly above the $2k mark. And while this particular rig has been on offer for $300 off for a while, it's now even cheaper than this with a $350 discount, retailing for $1,950 at Newegg.
To be clear, the cheap price of this rig isn't because Cooler Master has skimped on anything—far from it. This thing comes with an Intel Core i7 14700KF and 32 GB of DDR5-6000 RAM. That's faster memory than a lot of high-end builds at this price range, and it's a CPU that can deftly handle productivity tasks, too. (Just ensure you have the latest Intel microcode installed to prevent any voltage instability.)
The 7900 XTX performs about as well as the RTX 4080 and RTX 4080 Super, which is the best-performing graphics card on the market barring the outrageously expensive RTX 4090. Back when the 7900 XTX came out, we thought it wasn't a consistent RTX 4080 competitor, but driver updates have improved performance since then. Now, the 7900 XTX trades blows quite consistently with the RTX 4080 Super, though of course is very game-dependent.
In other words, the 7900 XTX should net you excellent GPU performance, without having to drop a huge amount of cash on the card alone.
So, why's this AMD build so cheap compared to similar Nvidia ones? Primarily because Nvidia graphics cards offer better ray tracing and upscaling/frame generation performance. But plenty of gamers don't care too much about ray tracing, and AMD's closing the upscaling/frame gen gap considerably. If it's sheer gaming chops (ie, raster performance) you're after, the 7900 XTX holds its own against one of Nvidia's best gaming GPUs.
If you're in the market for a high-end gaming PC and aren't dead-set on Nvidia's ecosystem, this Cooler Master build is definitely one to consider. It offers just about everything you might want from a high-end rig, and right now it offers this for a fair whack cheaper than the usual slew of circa-$2,000 builds.
