My aunt wants a gaming PC mainly for Call of Duty. She was quoted around £3,600 for a system with an RTX 5080 and Ryzen 7 9800X3D, but she would prefer to stay closer to £2,000. I'm considering an RX 9070 XT because it appears to offer fairly similar performance for much less money—possibly around 10% slower while saving roughly £1,600. I've been out of the PC-building scene for a while, so is there anything you would change in the planned build? Also, would many parts need to be changed if she decided to go with the RTX 5080 instead?
2 Answers
You can save even more without sacrificing much gaming performance. A Ryzen 7 7800X3D, an affordable air cooler, a suitable AM5 motherboard, 32GB of DDR5-6000 CL30 memory, a 2TB NVMe SSD, the RX 9070 XT, a well-ventilated case, and an 850W Gold-rated power supply should come in around £1,750 depending on current prices. The expensive PCIe 5.0 SSD is probably unnecessary for gaming, so choosing a good PCIe 4.0 drive could reduce the cost further. The RX 9070 XT also has enough performance for a high-end 1440p setup and should be a much better value here than paying several hundred pounds more for a 5080.
The RX 9070 XT build looks properly balanced, and the components should work together without any obvious issues. For Call of Duty, it should deliver excellent performance while keeping the total cost much lower than the RTX 5080 system.
That’s good to hear. If she does choose the RTX 5080 later, would I need to change much of the rest of the build?
Thanks, that build looks great. I’ll probably use it as the basis and swap the air cooler for a nicer-looking AIO since she prefers that style.