Market Watch
Mark Williams assesses a sampling of PC systems available this month.
Scorptec Vengeance RTX 2080 Ti Gaming PC $4,899 | TINYURL.COM/APC461-SCORP
A big price for big performance. This is the cost of wrapping a system around Nvidia’s latest and greatest GTX 2080 Ti graphics. The undisputed king of GPUs demands only the best system, and a big wallet to match. The best gaming CPU on the market with its high clock speeds will keep the monster GPU well fed, allowing you to push those shiny ray-traced graphics out at 4K resolutions or 144Hz+. Being water cooled and matched with higher speed RAM will allow for some reasonable overclocking explorations. The 32GB of RAM is perhaps overkill; some money could have been saved sticking to 16GB, but this will give productivity freedoms plus provide some future proofing. KEY SPECS: CPU: Intel Core i7- 8700K; Cooler: Corsair Hydro H115i Pro RGB; Motherboard: Asus ROG Strix Z370-E; Graphics: Zotac AMP GeForce RTX 2080 Ti 11GB; Memory: Corsair Vengeance RGB 32GB 3000MHz DDR4; Storage: Samsung 970 EVO 500GB M. 2 SSD, Seagate BarraCuda 2TB HDD; PSU: Corsair TX750M 750W; Case: Corsair Obsidian 500D
Umart Chronos RTX 2080 Ryzen 2700X Gaming PC $3,491 | TINYURL.COM/APC461-UMART
This one’s GTX 2080 is a GTX 1080 Ti killer, beating it by 6-8% on average and giving it the ability to run 4K games at 60fps. The CPU is AMD’s best, and while it hasn’t the top-end MHz speed of Intel chips, as long as you keep your games GPU-limited using high resolutions and effects, this won’t hold the GPU back all that much. Plus, it has the benefit of being an eight-core, 16-thread multithreading beast that will chew through any productivity work faster than any current consumer Intel chip. Matched with 32GB of RAM, this system is quite capable of completing serious work tasks, not just gaming. The 500GB NVMe SSD is nice, but comes at the cost of no HDD for mass storage. KEY SPECS: CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 2700X; Cooler: Wraith Prism RGB; Motherboard: MSI X470 Gaming Pro Carbon; Graphics: Gigabyte RTX 2080 Gaming OC; Memory: Ballistix 32GB RGB DDR4 3000MHz; Storage: Samsung 970 EVO Series 500GB M. 2 SSD; PSU: Corsair 850W HX850; Case: Fractal Design Define R6
PC Case Gear Intel NUC Mini PC i7-8705G $1,099 | TINYURL.COM/APC461-PCCG
Remember Intel’s Core i7-8xxxG series processors? The chips that made pigs fly, because both an Intel CPU and an AMD GPU were slapped onto the same substrate, making for a collaborative effort no one thought ever possible? Well, you can buy this piece of history in the most powerful NUC series to date. At the heart of this particular NUC is the Intel Core i7-8705G. Which sports an 8th-gen quad-core hyperthreaded CPU running at up to 4.1GHz plus an AMD Vega M GL GPU with 20 compute units running at up to 1011MHz. It’s the lowest end Hades Canyon NUC, but with it only missing 100-200MHz compared to the top SKU, and four GPU compute units, the cheaper price and lower 65W TDP make this a more desirable choice if system noise levels are of importance to you. KEY SPECS: CPU: Intel Core i7- 8705G; Cooler: OEM; Motherboard: OEM; Graphics: AMD Vega M GL; Memory: None; Storage: None; Power Supply: OEM