I must admit, there’s a level of vicarious living going on for me when I highlight gaming PC deals like this one. I get to imagine I’m the one unboxing it after it arrives on my doorstep, and that’s more exciting when it’s actually realistic—arguably downright sensible—compared to opening up some RTX 5090 build for over $3,500.
The AMD Ryzen 5 9600X backing up this GPU is nothing to write home about, but it keeps up pretty well with even more powerful non-X3D chips for gaming. It’ll be enough to keep the RX 9070 XT chugging along just fine.
There is, of course, a sacrifice for this low price, but it’s really not a big one. The only real sacrifice is that you’re getting just 1 TB of storage—and I’d definitely recommend adding another terabyte ASAP, before we get any whiff of SSD prices starting to climb thanks to memory shortages—but you can get by on that, and it shouldn’t affect gaming performance, just the number of games you can keep installed at any one time.
And on the flipside, you’re actually getting faster RAM in this build than you get even in many more expensive gaming PCs. Which is great considering the aforementioned memory shortage, which is affecting RAM prices much more than SSD prices at the moment. Getting some good memory in your rig is certainly no bad shout right now.
The brand, Andromeda Insights, isn’t the most well-known, but while we’ve not tested any of the system builder’s PCs at PC Gamer, there do seem to be a bunch of good user reviews for them on different websites. For the price on this build, I wouldn’t mind foregoing a big brand’s proprietary case and other components. The chassis looks rather nice, anyway, with its short and chunky rear-PSU form factor.