I’m putting together a new gaming PC and would appreciate some feedback before I order everything. I’m currently looking at a Ryzen 7 9700X paired with an RTX 5070 Ti.
Here’s the list:
I’m trying to keep the total around $3,500 USD, and I’d really like to keep the build mostly/all white if possible.
The main goal is gaming at 1440p
Are there any parts you would swap out for better value or performance?
Going off Tom’s Hardware 1440p GPU ranking the 5070Ti, 9070XT and 7900XTX are all in the same ballpark raster performance.
I purchased a 7700X, 7900XTX, 32GB RAM around when those parts were new, I have a 1440p 144hz monitor, to be honest it’s a bit of overkill for my games (right now Valheim, arma3) but it was nice for Cyberpunk 2077. I don’t think more than 16GB of RAM gets used very often on my PC.
I noticed in my part of the world the 9070 XT is notably cheaper.
I’m happy to give up NVIDIA’s framegen and upscaling tech in exchange for zero effort Linux AMD GPU drivers. NVIDIA works on Linux, it’s just more PITA. So if you don’t like where Windows 11 is going that’s a factor to consider.
What you’ve got seems fine to me though.
3.5kUSD is a lot of cash - but if you’re in the financial position to upgrade in our current dark economic times sure why not!
I find I worry about parts when I’m buying them, but once they’ve been sitting in the house a few weeks I stop caring about ±20% performance dollar opportunity costs, or that it’s a mid instead of high end SSD.
Hmmm…
I see quite a few shaves to make here, that could perhaps help.
Since you seem to be going for an all white build; these are the changes I would make to that.
| Type | Item | Price |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | AMD Ryzen 9 9900X | $334.00 |
| CPU Cooler | Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 SE WHITE ARGB | $38.59 |
| Motherboard | Gigabyte X870 AORUS ELITE WIFI7 ICE | $210.01 |
| Memory | Silicon Power XPOWER Zenith Gaming 2x16 GB DDR5-6000 CL30 | $397.97 |
| Storage | TEAMGROUP MP44L 2 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 | $292.99 |
| Video Card | XFX Swift Radeon RX 9070 XT 16 GB | $769.99 |
| Case | Fractal Design Pop 2 Vision RGB | $109.98 |
| Power Supply | SeaSonic Focus GX V4 ATX 3 (2024) 850 W Gold Fully Modular | $149.99 |
| Total | $2303.52 |
4 extra cores for $35 more; RAM and SSD shaved to more budget friendly options; All 100% white; And $1100 below budget.
And you could throw in a 5080 in there if you really want to. I wouldn’t. But you could.
Now, GPU. Radeon is the best bang for buck with 90% the performance of the 5070 Ti, but the 5070 Ti does offer a better experience if you stream and Ray trace a lot.
Feel free to mix and match any of my suggestions!
220 dollars for 3 RGB casefans? Frack me! There must be cheaper RGB-fans around. I don’t like RBG so I use Antic P12 case fans, cost around 10 dollar per fan that you will never hear and cools well enough.
I took over brothers old PC and made it into a NAS. Switched the casefans because they sounded like a tractor. Now, with Antic P12 (same as in my normal gaming PC), I can’t even tell when the NAS is on. Except there is a blue light in the front of the case.
Nvidia vs AMD on Linux: Nvidia has a 10-50% performance penalty on Linux compared to AMD in DX12 titles. And compared to Windows too. Not great. If you have ANY plans to use Linux, I would never get an Nvidia card. The perf bug is 2 years old by now with no fix in sight. Took them around a year to even acknowledge it IIRC. Not a great look either. Here is the forum thread: DirectX12 performance is terrible on Linux - Linux - NVIDIA Developer Forums
I used to use Nvidia, RTX 2080. Even back then, there was constantly promises of the next thing/driver version solving things, it just never happened. Fsync, Esync, whatever it was. Now Descriptor Heap etc. The same old story.
On top of that, lots of custom Launch Commands for every different game you want to have a chance at playing and not crashing instantly. It gets old fast. Cyberpunk would crash within 30 secs, every time. Zero issues on AMD. Even played thru Phantom Liberty, 2-3 times. Since I switched to AMD, first 6800XT and now 9070XT, I’ve not had to care if I run Wayland, I don’t even have to use a single Launch command. It is as troublefree as I can imagine it.
I’ve been on Linux exclusively for 5 years. Biggest upgrade to my computer-life was to dump MS Windows and Nvidia GPUs.
I use ROCm too, for LLMs. My problem with that is, Cuda vs ROCm, how fast do you want AI to lie to you? Does it really matter? Just a few days ago, LLM suggested I use “dolphin --create-configuration”. Only problem is, Dolphin, the filemanager, does not have that option. That is how much I trust LLMs. I was using Qwen3 14B params, Claude 4.5 Opus. Since my 9070XT has 16 gigs of VRAM, it fits. Still, next to useless.