Here’s a puzzle for you to solve: Is it better to buy a new graphics card or a new gaming PC? Normally, the answer would be to choose the first one, as your average GPU is a fraction of the price that an entire rig sells for.
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But what if the graphics card in question just so happens to be a GeForce RTX 5090 and the price tag is an eye-watering $2,650? What kind of gaming PC can you get for that kind of money, you may wonder.
Well, ponder no more, as I’ve found you the perfect gaming machine that costs just $50 more than a 5090, but will give you a whole lot more pleasure.
Quick links
- PNY RTX 5090 graphics card | $2,650 @ B&H Photo
- Skytech Legacy RTX 5080 gaming PC | $2,700 @ Newegg
PNY GeForce RTX 5090 ARGB EPIC-X RGB OC Edition
Yes, this is the most powerful gaming graphics card you can buy, and yes—this is as cheap as they come at the moment. Two thousand, six hundred and fifty of your hard-earned dollars, bar a single cent, for a mighty GeForce RTX 5090.
It is ridiculously capable and not just in gaming. If your side-hustle involves a lot of content creation or AI work, then this thing will just barnstorm through anything you dare to throw at it.
However, humungous price tag aside, the RTX 5090 will gobble up energy like nothing else, and its 575 W TGP means you need a seriously potent power supply unit to keep it happy. You’ll also need a whole bunch of fans in your case to shift all that heat out of the way, too.
If you have the cash and want the outright fastest GPU to sit in a gaming PC, then go ahead and grab one. Don’t worry about regrets, ignore the naysayers. Just do it. Or maybe not, especially when you see what you can get for $100 less…
Skytech Legacy RTX 5080 gaming PC
Yes, that’s right. For a mere fifty smackeroonies more than the asking price of a single RTX 5090, you can have an entire gaming PC. And not just any old box of tat, either.
Heading up the specs list is the GeForce RTX 5080 graphics card, Nvidia’s second most powerful in its Blackwell family of GPUs. No, it’s not as powerful as an RTX 5080, and as you can see in the performance charts below, it’s short by some margin.
Only in games that are heavily CPU-limited, such as Homeworld 3, does the RTX 5080 come anywhere near to an RTX 5090. But that’s fine because the real-world gaming performance you can get out of the 5080 is more than good enough to enjoy in anything you play.
Plus if you do need a bit more oomph, just enable DLSS upscaling and/or frame generation. In the case of the latter, the RTX 5080 supports Multi Frame Generation, which is borderline magic as to how well it can boost frame rates without adding masses of latency.
And the supporting act behind the RTX 5080 in this gaming PC is as good as you could want. The Ryzen 7 9800X3D is the best CPU for gaming, as we probably all know by now, and it’s backed by 32 GB of DDR5-6000 RAM. That’s more than enough memory for gaming and it’s running at the sweet spot for Ryzen chips.
The amount of storage you get, though, is disappointing—just a single 1 TB NVMe SSD. In this price sector, that’s rather rubbish, but it’s not hard to add a second, big solid state drive to store your Steam library on.
But this Newegg deal has a twist in its tail, in the form of a free 32-inch 1440p 165 Hz gaming monitor, worth $250. It’s a Skytech-branded model, but if you don’t have a monitor already, it’ll be serviceable enough until you can afford something better (32 inches is too big for 1440p, so text will be a bit woolly-looking).
You could use it as a secondary monitor, gift it to a friend or family member, or maybe even sell it on to fund a second SSD.
It doesn’t really matter what you do, though, as while there are cheaper gaming RTX 5080 gaming PC deals to be found, none are packing the mighty 9800X3D. All of them, though, give you a lot more hardware than a single RTX 5090 graphics card.
I know which one I’d buy…
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