I'm putting together a £900 gaming PC in the UK, mainly for 1440p gaming in Rainbow Six Siege, Call of Duty, Fortnite, Valorant, GTA, and Minecraft. I don't need to budget for peripherals. The RTX 3080 and 32GB of RAM would be bought used with a five-year warranty, while the other parts would be new.
Parts list:
- Ryzen 5 7600X
- RTX 3080 10GB
- 32GB DDR5-6000 CL30
- 1TB NVMe SSD
- ASRock B650M WiFi motherboard
- Corsair 750W 80+ Gold PSU
Does this get the best performance and value for £900, or would you change any components? I'd prefer to stay on AM5 so I have a worthwhile CPU upgrade path later.
2 Answers
The Ryzen 5 7600X is already a strong choice for 1440p, especially when the RTX 3080 will usually be the limiting part. A Ryzen 7 7800X3D would improve CPU-limited performance and could make a future GPU upgrade easier, but it may not improve frame rates much in GPU-bound or visually demanding games. I’d prioritize the GPU first unless the 7800X3D is available at an unusually low price.
If you were buying everything brand new, an Intel Core i5-13400 or i5-14400 with DDR4 and a newer GPU such as the RX 9070 GRE could potentially offer more performance for less money. However, the used RTX 3080 and RAM make your actual total closer to £900, so the comparison depends heavily on those second-hand prices and warranty coverage.
That makes sense for a completely new build, but I’m planning to buy the 3080 and RAM with five-year warranties, which brings the total to about £900. I also want AM5 so I can upgrade the CPU later without replacing the motherboard and memory platform.
Exactly—an X3D chip won’t magically add many frames when the GPU is already at full load. For story-focused or graphically intensive games, spending more on the graphics card is likely to matter more than replacing the 7600X.