Considering that the original RTX 4080 was priced at $1,200 at launch, the fact that the upgraded RTX 4080 Super graphics card can be found in gaming PCs for under $2,000 is quite impressive. Sure, the new card somewhat corrects Nvidia's initial arrogance by lowering the price to a more reasonable (though still painfully expensive) $999 despite the improved specs, but no second-class gaming PC with an Nvidia GPU has ever been a better I've never seen a better bargain.

Newegg is selling this card in the ABS Vortex-X Ruby for $1,200, a $400 reduction from the original $2,400.

However, the concessions ABS made to achieve this price point are obvious, and they are evident in the choice of CPU and the level of SSD storage. The processor is AMD's mid-range Ryzen 7 7700X (an 8-core, 16-thread Zen 4, a reliable workhorse, but no better) and the storage capacity is only 1 terabyte. If you're going to spend this much, you'll definitely want 2 TB of space.

Also, since the ABS is mounted on an MSI B650 motherboard in a Thermaltake chassis, it does not get the full PCIe 5.0 capabilities that AMD's platform can offer. In other words, there is no PCIe graphics slot or SSD M.2 port. Right now, this is not a big mistake, as Gen5 SSDs offer little more than some benchmark numbers and a serious increase in heat generation, and graphics cards rarely use the full bandwidth of the PCIe Gen4 interface. But aside from that, it is a rather bare-bones motherboard.

But in a gaming PC full of hits, these are just a few mistakes. What this motherboard does have is the DDR5 support required for the Zen 4 CPU and 32 GB at 6,000 MT/s. This is more than enough for both gaming and content creation needs. The most obvious hit, however, is the graphics card: the RTX 4080 Super is an excellent 4K GPU, and ABS' MSI Gaming X Slim is a solid choice among Nvidia board partners.

It also comes with a 1,000W power supply. However, it is only listed as a generic ABS power supply, and the exact source of its power delivery technology is not clear. This is still enough power to continue powering the RTX 4080 Super and should be able to handle the next GPU generation.

If you want to go the Intel route, and with all the goodwill currently surrounding the Intel brand, who wouldn't? This chip has 16 cores and 24 threads and is a bit more powerful than the Ryzen 7 7700X, but Yeyian's machine is otherwise very similar, albeit with only an 850W PSU.

It will be a while before either of these machines offer a superior gaming experience and this kind of performance can be found at a lower price.