This RTX 4070 gaming PC is cheaper than a good RTX 3080 setup from last year's sales
There's a lot to like here, especially when it's just $1249.
Yeyian Tanto | Core i5 13400F | RTX 4070 | 16GB DDR5-5600 | 1TB SSD | 650W PSU | $1,599 $1,249 at Newegg (save $350)
This gaming PC is packing a lot of hardware for not a lot of money. There's a 10-core, 16-thread CPU that will handle pretty much any game you like and the RTX 4070 is a great 1440p GPU. Even 4K isn't out of reach, thanks to its DLSS upscaling and frame generation features. The storage and RAM are perfectly acceptable in capacity and speed, but the PSU is fairly miserly at just 650W. If you wanted to upgrade the graphics card to something like an RTX 4090, you'd need to replace the power supply.
This has been a great year for PC games and with so many sporting the latest graphics technology and techniques, this is an ideal starter or upgrade PC to enjoy them on.
Don't be fooled by the fact that the CPU is a budget model. The Core i5 13400F has six P-cores and four E-cores, and with a maximum clock of 4.6GHz, you won't feel much need to have anything better. One good thing about this PC is that the motherboard supports all 13th and 14th Gen Intel processors, so if you do want to upgrade in the future, you won't need to change the motherboard and RAM.
The GeForce RTX 4070 is an excellent GPU and performs just as well as the previous gen RTX 3080 in most games. It fully supports every feature in Nvidia's DLSS 3.5 so you'll be able to activate upscaling and frame generation, in games that offer them, for higher frame rates.
For once, this is a prebuilt PC that sports dual channel RAM. With two sticks of 8GB DDR5-5600, the i5 13400F processor isn't going to be short on memory bandwidth. At this price, you'd normally expect to see older DDR4 or just one stick of 16GB RAM.
It's not a perfect gaming PC, though. The AIO CPU cooler is disappointing, as it only has a single 120mm fan and radiator combination. There are another five fans throughout the case but they're probably not going to be enough to stop the CPU from getting rather toasty in a heavy gaming session.
And the power supply unit (PSU) is only 650W. That's more than enough for all the components in this PC but if you wanted to upgrade the CPU and GPU in the future, then you will probably need to replace the PSU with an 850W version or better.
Lastly, it would have been nice to have seen a 2TB SSD or even just a second drive, such as 2TB HDD. Lots of today's games take up huge chunks of storage and that 1TB SSD could quickly fill up. Fortunately, the motherboard has another M.2 slot to add another SSD, but only the one.
Despite these fairly minor issues, the overall balance of components in this Yeyian Tanto gaming PC is spot on.
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Nick, gaming, and computers all first met in 1981, with the love affair starting on a Sinclair ZX81 in kit form and a book on ZX Basic. He ended up becoming a physics and IT teacher, but by the late 1990s decided it was time to cut his teeth writing for a long defunct UK tech site. He went on to do the same at Madonion, helping to write the help files for 3DMark and PCMark. After a short stint working at Beyond3D.com, Nick joined Futuremark (MadOnion rebranded) full-time, as editor-in-chief for its gaming and hardware section, YouGamers. After the site shutdown, he became an engineering and computing lecturer for many years, but missed the writing bug. Cue four years at TechSpot.com and over 100 long articles on anything and everything. He freely admits to being far too obsessed with GPUs and open world grindy RPGs, but who isn't these days?