Ben Madilynn
With Amazon Big Deal Days now in full flow, there are lots of great pre-built offers going around, like this Lenovo Legion system, with an RTX 4070 Ti Super and coming in at a cent shy of $1,600. That got us all chatting in the office about whether you could buy an equal or better system for the same money.
Big vendors like Lenovo pay less for all its parts because it buys them in bulk so I expected it to be tricky to beat. But never one to back away from a challenge, I dove into the Prime Day sales and I reckon I’ve come up with a better gaming PC rig than what Lenovo is offering.
Not only is my total cost less ($1,593.14 vs $1,599.99) but it’s also faster and has twice as much storage. It…ah…doesn’t have an operating system, though. But hey, gaming on Linux is pretty good these days!
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AMD Ryzen 7 7700X
I know PC gaming enthusiasts would love a 3D V-Cache chip in this build but have you seen how expensive they are? Yeah, that’s really not going to happen with this tight budget but don’t worry, the Ryzen 7 7700X is still a really good processor.
Not only is it top-notch in gaming (check our review for the stats) but it’s also pretty handy for content creation workloads. I’ve built a few systems with a Ryzen 7 7700X now and it’s a solid, all-round CPU.
AMD systems can be a little twitchy at times and they can take a while to settle down with drivers and settings, but once all sorted, they run cool, fast, and stable. Zen 4 chips tend to have quite high core temperatures when under load but don’t worry about it, as they’re designed to be like this.
ASRock B650E PG Riptide
A great CPU needs an equally great motherboard to make the most of it. The best AM5 motherboards are pretty expensive so in order to keep under budget, a few things had to be sacrificed.
This ASRock B650E PG Riptide is a really solid motherboard and comes equipped with a PCIe 5.0 graphics card slot and an M.2 SSD socket directly wired to the CPU, so you’re not missing out there. However, the other slots aren’t as top-spec: the other x16 PCIe slot is actually x4 Gen3 and the small x4 slot is just x1 Gen4. There are two more M.2 sockets, but while one is x4 Gen4, the other is only x2 Gen3.
But to make up for that, ASRock has stuffed 10 USB ports in the rear IO panel, plus you get Wi-Fi 6E and 2.5G Ethernet.
Better still, the motherboard fully supports all Zen 4 and Zen 5 AM5 processors, so if you do want to upgrade to an X3D processor at some point, it’ll handle it with no problems whatsoever.
Team Group DDR5-6000 32 GB CL30 kit
All PCs need RAM but when it comes to AM5 Ryzen gaming PCs, what they really need is fast, low-latency, dual-channel DDR5 RAM to get the best performance out of the processor.
This Team Group kit offers all of that (two 16 GB DIMMs, running at 6,000 MT/s EXPO mode, and with a CAS latency of 30) and for a very reasonable price. You can get cheaper RAM, of course, but it won’t be as fast as this kit.
What you’re not getting are fancy RGB LEDs everywhere, but that’s a very small price to pay for the speed and stability you’re getting here. Just jam the sticks into the motherboard, set EXPO mode in the motherboard BIOS, wait a while for all the RAM checks to run, and you’re done.
MSI GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super Ventus 3X Black OC
Ah if only the RTX 4090 cost as little as this. That’ll never happen (or at least, not for a very long time) but then again, I don’t think you’ll get anything as good as this RTX 4070 Ti Super for this kind of money. The Radeon RX 7900 XTX is faster in games that don’t use ray tracing, but it’s more expensive.
When it launched, this MSI model had a bit of a wonky BIOS, robbing some of the GPU’s performance, but that’s all been fixed now and this card is now Nvidia’s third-best graphics card (the original RTX 4080 has been discontinued). Yes, it’s a lot of money but it’s also a lot of GPU, capable of gaming, content creation, and AI workloads.
Plus I really dig its super-chonky appearance. That cooler is absolutely massive so you’ll have no concerns about the GPU or VRAM overheating.
Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 SE
No, it’s not an AIO liquid cooler. Yes, it’s very cheap. No, it’s not rubbish. In fact, the Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 SE is one of the very best air coolers you can buy and it’ll handle the Ryzen 7 7700X with ease.
I have three of them in various systems around my office and it’s whisper quiet, even when being pushed really hard. The only thing it lacks compared to the Lenovo Legion gaming PC is RGB but that’s fine by me. I’ll take cheap and brilliant over pretty LEDs every time.
Nextorage NEM-PAB 2 TB
Nextorage started life as a division in Sony before being spun off into its own business and it makes some really good SSDs these days. This particular model (NEM-PAB) doesn’t have any DRAM cache so it can’t sustain its full speed when you’re transferring hundreds of gigabytes around, but other than that, it’s as fast as you like.
The understated heatsink is really effective, too, and you won’t need to worry about it being thermally limited, once situated next to a big GPU. You won’t be able to use the M.2 heatsink that the ASRock motherboard has but that’s fine, as this one is better.
NZXT H7 Elite
When it comes to choosing a case, I simply went with something that was similar in size and appearance to that used by Lenovo, but I was surprised to see a high quality NZXT model having such a big discount.
And it is a really good case, with plenty of space inside for that humungous RTX 4070 Ti Super, and it also comes with three 140 mm RGB fans in the front. I’d personally take one out and install it at the rear to improve the overall airflow but given how cheap 140 mm fans are, you could easily by an extra one to preserve the looks of the front.
Thermaltake Toughpower GF3 850 W
Last but by no means least, we come to the all-important power supply. You really don’t want to cheap out here and while Thermaltake’s models aren’t at the cutting edge of PSU technology, they’re still very solid.
This 850 W model has more than enough power headroom for the Ryzen and GeForce combo, plus it even has a dedicated 12VHPWR socket and cable, so you can wire the 4070 Ti Super directly to the PSU. No need for funny old adapters to worry about.
So there you go, one full (well, mostly full) system build that’s better than the Lenovo model and costs a tiny bit less. Yes, I know it doesn’t come with Windows but if you already have an old system, you can always reuse that key, or be brave and make the jump to Linux!
