Let's say you're in the market for a new gaming PC and your budget is between $1,600 and $2,000. You're rightly going to have some pretty serious expectations of any PC on offer. It will need to have a modern, fast CPU that's been paired with plenty of equally fast RAM, to ensure that it'll cope with all of the latest games.
Naturally, it must have a decent graphics card, too—one that supports all of the latest graphics technology and will cope with just about any rendering task you ask of it. Lastly, you'd expect to see plenty of storage, options for upgrading, and even things like cooling or lighting will need to pass muster. This ABS Stratos Ruby gaming PC ticks almost all those boxes.
Heading the specs table is the Ryzen 7 7700X CPU, with eight cores, 16 threads of Zen 4 architecture, and a boost clock of 5.4 GHz. It's pretty light on power consumption, with a TDP of 105 W—20 W lower than equivalent Intel processors. Activate ECO mode and it'll sip power, while still delivering great performance.
AMD's Ryzen chips work best when paired with fast dual-channel RAM and ABS has done the right thing here by installing two 16GB sticks of DDR5-6000, which is the ideal rating for a balance of speed and stability. It's from a reliable brand, Team Group, and even sports a spot of RGB lighting.
All of that would be for naught if the graphics card wasn't up to scratch, but here you're getting a GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super. Daft name aside, this is a meaty GPU, with 8,448 shaders, a boost clock of 2,625 MHz (it's an overclocked Gigabyte model), plus 16GB of fast GDDR6X VRAM. As with all of Nvidia's RTX 40-series cards, it fully supports DLSS 3.5 so in games that offer the feature, you'll be able to enable AI-processed upscaling, frame generation, or ray tracing denoising for more performance or better graphics.
Unfortunately, there's only 1TB of NVMe storage, and that's probably down to the rise in SSD prices. To make matters worse, it's a Kingston NV2 drive, which is only rated to peak read/write speeds of 3,500 and 2,800 MB/s. For a PCIe 4.0 SSD, that's not great. The Gigabyte B650 motherboard in the ABS Stratos Ruby only has one more M.2 slot so you'd need to consider at least 2TB, when looking for an SSD upgrade.
But that's about it for genuine negatives, as the rest is all good. Ryzen CPUs can get a bit toasty at times (think high temperatures, rather than big globs of heat) but ABS have stuck a Thermaltake 240 mm AIO cooler in there, which will be more than up to the job. Plus there's a total of four RGB fans ensuring there's plenty of air flowing through the case.
It looks good, has great hardware (SSD aside), and with this deal, you're saving $300 off the original list price. It's a fab PC and it'll easily handle any 1440p gaming workload and even 4K in the latest games, when you apply a spot of upscaling. Best of all, AMD will be supporting the AM5 platform, as used here, for a couple more generations at least, so you'll be able to upgrade the internals in the future.
