Around a month ago we saw an RTX 3080-powered Alienware gaming PC deeply discounted down to $1500. That was a bit of a bargain to be sure, but that level of gaming performance looks set to stay at that price point with the standard price of this ABS Stratos Aqua PC being $1,500 at Newegg today.
That's all thanks to the RTX 4070, launched last week and in affordable gaming PCs this week. It's that GPU inside the ABS Stratos Aqua rig which gives it the same level of gaming performance as an RTX 3080-based machine, and gives it the potential to even push past that.
Despite the similar rasterised gaming performance between the RTX 4070 and RTX 3080, the newer Ada GPU has the opportunity to go further in terms of future gaming performance because of its access to DLSS 3.0 and Frame Generation. The voodoo of Nvidia's AI frame interpolation tech can deliver entirely unrendered frames into a game's output, making a huge difference to the overall smoothness of supported titles.
The ABS rig is ostensibly sporting a lower tier CPU—the Intel Core i5 13400F—compared with the previously mentioned Alienware machine. But only in that the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X is an eight-core, 16-thread chip while the Intel processor is a hybrid 6+4 core CPU that also has 16 threads.
It will still outperform the last-gen AMD chip, however, and more than ably supports the Nvidia graphics card. The ABS machine also comes with 16GB of memory, but in this instance it's DDR5-5600 instead of DDR4-3200, and it also sports a full 1TB of NVMe SSD storage.
Honestly, there's nothing here that gives me any pause recommending this as a well-priced, well-performing gaming PC. The air cooler will be fine for a Core i5 13400F, and you get a decent 700W 80+ Gold power supply, too.
The ABS Stratos Aqua isn't on sale for a discounted price right now, so this is its standard retail level. Which hints that we should be able to see this sort of gaming performance down below the $1,500 mark when the deals seasons roll around.
