I'm in the UK and have a budget of £1,800–£2,300 for the PC itself, excluding monitors and peripherals. I'm considering a 600Hz Zowie monitor and an upcoming 24-inch 540Hz OLED, so I'll try both and keep whichever I prefer.
The main games will be Valorant and Kovaak's, with the goal of competing at the highest possible level, along with future games such as GTA 6 and Lord of Mysteries. I also want to stream on Twitch. I've never built a PC before, but I plan to assemble it myself.
My preferences are a black case, minimal RGB, a 360mm AIO, and a 2TB SSD. Reliable cooling is especially important because my current laptop thermal-throttles even during relatively light tasks such as watching YouTube, Terraria, or Valorant. I'd also appreciate advice on whether an Nvidia GPU would be worthwhile for streaming, ShadowPlay, and encoder quality.
1 Answer
A strong build for this budget would center on a Ryzen 7 9800X3D, a Radeon RX 9070 XT, 32GB of DDR5-6000 CL30 memory, and a 2TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD. Pair that with a quality B850 motherboard, a 360mm Arctic Liquid Freezer cooler, a well-ventilated black case, and an 850W Gold modular power supply. That gives you excellent competitive-gaming performance, enough GPU power for modern releases, and plenty of PSU headroom for future upgrades. Make sure the case has good radiator support and front-to-back airflow, and remember to enable the memory’s EXPO profile in the BIOS after building.
The 5070 Ti can make sense if streaming features are a priority. Nvidia’s NVENC encoder and software ecosystem are generally more convenient for Twitch, and ShadowPlay is useful for recording clips. For pure gaming performance, especially depending on the prices available in the UK, the RX 9070 XT may offer better value and more VRAM. Compare the current prices rather than assuming the 5070 Ti is automatically faster; choose Nvidia if the encoder, recording tools, ray tracing, or DLSS are worth the extra cost to you.
Would an RTX 5070 Ti be a worthwhile upgrade instead? I’ve heard Nvidia has better streaming encoders, and I’d also be able to use ShadowPlay.