I'm planning to build a gaming-only PC in France with a maximum budget of €6,000. I mainly play demanding AAA titles such as Resident Evil, Cyberpunk 2077, Monster Hunter, God of War, and Horizon, and I'd like to use maximum or Ultra settings with ray tracing whenever practical. My target is 1440p at 120Hz, with very smooth performance and excellent image quality. I already own a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and headset, so the budget is only for the computer itself. I'm not looking to spend the entire amount unnecessarily—I'd prefer the best price-to-performance balance and would like recommendations for a complete configuration starting from scratch.
2 Answers
For the best value, a Ryzen 7 9800X3D paired with a Radeon RX 9070 XT would make a very strong 1440p system. The 9070 XT is excellent for high-refresh gaming and costs much less than a comparable high-end Nvidia card. Nvidia still has an advantage in ray tracing, but AMD’s current ray-tracing performance is capable, especially at 1440p. A quality build with strong cooling, a fast NVMe SSD, and a suitable power supply should come in well below €6,000, leaving room for extra storage or 48–64GB of memory if you have a reason to need it. A 360mm liquid cooler would also provide plenty of thermal headroom, although it isn’t essential for gaming alone.
You don’t need to spend anywhere near €6,000 for 1440p at 120Hz. A roughly €2,500 gaming PC should already exceed 120 FPS in many games, though the most demanding titles may require upscaling or a few settings adjustments. If you specifically want stronger ray tracing, you could replace the Radeon card with an RTX 5080; the rest of the system and power supply could support it, but it would add several hundred euros and still wouldn’t provide twice the performance of the 9070 XT. Spending the remaining budget on a higher-refresh OLED monitor, additional storage, or other upgrades may offer more noticeable benefits than an excessively expensive tower.
That’s a useful perspective. Since I already have a 120Hz display, I’ll weigh whether a faster OLED monitor would be a better upgrade than putting the entire budget into the PC.
Thanks—that sounds like a good value-focused direction. I’ll also compare the ray-tracing performance before deciding between AMD and Nvidia.