The start of a new GPU generation is never pretty, but this time around, things have felt extra bleak. From AMD's seeming unwillingness to be forthcoming about its new GPUs at CES to astronomical Nvidia 50-series pricing, an RTX 5070 that is—sorry, not sorry—actually laughable, and almost immediate launch day GPU sell-outs… yeah, this gen has been a lot to deal with.
So pinch me and colour me translucent because there are not only RX 9070 gaming PCs in stock but some that are actually reasonably priced. I'm looking at this Skytech Shadow in particular, which is currently going for $1,350 at Newegg.
I was keeping an eye on GPU stocks and prices during the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT launch day, and the single thing that kept my spirits intact as graphics card after graphics card slipped into 'out of stock' territory was the presence of gaming PCs like this one. After witnessing such volatile stocks, they offered a glimmer of hope for the PC gaming market in the first half of 2025.
Why this one in particular, though? If I were on the market for a new gaming PC on some semblance of a budget, this is the build I'd be looking at. That's primarily because, with the help of some overclocking, the AMD Radeon RX 9070 at the heart of this build is within range of its bigger 'XT' sibling, as our Dave found out in his AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT review.
With a -140 mV undervolt and +10% power, the RX 9070 non-XT clipped at the heels of the RX 9070 XT and even beat the RTX 5070 Ti in some games. And sure, you're not getting Nvidia's fancy new Multi Frame Generation, but you are getting stellar machine learning-powered FSR 4 upscaling and frame gen plus (shocker for AMD) actually decent ray tracing performance.
The rest of this Skytech build isn't exactly anything to write home about, but it is enough to keep the RX 9070 happily chugging along, provided you don't run loads of background apps while gaming and you don't like to keep a giant game library installed. But memory and storage is easy (and can be quite cheap) to upgrade, so you shouldn't be stuck on this front.
You won't be wanting to do heavy productivity tasks on this thing either, because that is only a cheaper Core i5 processor it's rocking. But for gaming with a midrange GPU, that won't affect things too much.
The simple fact is, with this build, you're getting a stellar current-gen GPU plus the other hardware that keeps it running for just $1,350. For 1440p gaming (and even some light 4K gaming), you can't ask for much more for the money.
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