If you're going to spend nearly $2,000 on a new gaming PC, you'll want it to handle just about any game you have, even at 4K resolution. Well, that's exactly what this ABS Kaze Ruby rig will be able to do and I should know, because I have an RTX 4080 Super myself and use a Ryzen 7 7700X in one of my test machines.
The former is Nvidia's second most powerful graphics card after the RTX 4090, but since those are priced into the realms of ridiculousness, the 4080 Super is the sensible high-end choice. With 10,240 shaders, a boost clock of 2,625 MHz, and 16 GB of fast VRAM, it'll spit out frames like nobody's business.
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And if it's not enough, you've got the full gamut of DLSS 3.5 technologies (AI-powered upscaling, frame generation, and ray tracing denoising) to boost performance and graphics in those games that support them. Make no mistake, it's a properly fast GPU.
Such things demand a powerful CPU to ensure the graphics card is never left waiting around for a new frame to render and you're getting a peach of a processor here, in the form of the Ryzen 7 7700X.
While AMD's X3D grab all the gaming headlines, I feel that too many people pass this chip by because it 'only' has eight cores and 16 threads. But trust me, I've tested more than enough games with this CPU to know that it's more than good enough to be paired with an RTX 4080 Super.
And it gets better, as ABS has cleverly chosen to install 32 GB of dual-channel DDR5 RAM, set to 6,000 MT/s—the sweet spot for fast Ryzen processors.
There's only one niggle with this build. It's not the cooling solution, as that Thermaltake UX200 air cooler will cope with the Ryzen's heat output just fine, and there are a total of four 120 mm fans to ensure that there's good airflow in the case (which itself is designed to minimise restrictions to the flow).
The issue I have is with the storage. Yes, it's a Gen4 NVMe drive but it's only 1 TB in size, and for a gaming PC of this price, it's not big enough. You'll easily fill that up with games. It doesn't help that it's a Kingston NV2 model either, which isn't especially fast.
Fortunately, speedy 2 TB SSDs are available in the Black Friday sales, and that's the first thing I'd add to the machine. Install Steam onto the new drive and you'll have bags of room for all your games. The motherboard has three M.2 slots in total, though one of them is half Gen4 speed, but that's enough to seriously load up on storage.
Get this gaming rig and you'll have a serious machine for years to come. And when you have the money for an upgrade, you could pop in a Ryzen 7 9800X3D for the ultimate gaming machine.
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If the $699 price tag on this RTX 4060 Black Friday gaming PC wasn't tempting enough, Walmart is trying to lure me in with a free copy of Assassin's Creed Shadows
