RTX 4080 GAMING MACHINE

An AMD Ryzen 7 7700X and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Founders Edition walk into a bar… Unfortunately for our builder, Sam Lewis, things didn’t get off to a great start

WE DIDN’T HAVE the easiest time with this machine, but that’s nothing to ward you away from using either the RTX 4080 or one of the latest AM5 chips. PC building isn’t always fun and games.

We’d been looking forward to testing the founder’s edition RTX 4080 in a machine, especially since Nvidia unreleased the initial 12GB model. Although we didn’t rate it as highly as the RTX 4090, there’s no denying you’ll get a great gaming experience from it.

Our humble CPU got a warmer reception when we reviewed that, so we were as excited to add this into its first build as we were with our GPU. This AMD Ryzen 7 7700X boasts great eco-performance and impressive bang for your buck. As it sits in the middle of the new AM5 releases, it tends to get overlooked but we can’t wait to get it in the hot seat for this machine.

What is that seat, you may ask? Well, it’s a darn good one, the Asus ROG Strix B650-A Gaming WIFI. A fullyfledged motherboard with an abundance of features and futureproofing capabilities to get the best out of our CPU/GPU combo. We always try to keep futureproofing a key part of building a PC. Especially when we’re using expensive components, you want them to perform at their best with plenty of longevity too.

DDR5 is a good example of this methodology as DDR4 has practically been phased out by its nextgen equivalent. We’ve pieced in some of our favorite Corsair Vengeance DDR5 DIMM sticks here to help run alongside our zippy new AM5 processor. Also, one of our favorite SSDs of recent times, the SK Hynix Platinum P41, makes its way on board for excessively speedy storage performance.