the AMD 7800 battleship
The best new mid-range AMD system?
WITH A POSITIVE outcome from our October 2023 build, the new budget AMD, we wanted to step things up with AMD’s latest GPU, the Radeon RX 7800 XT. Pair this with the almighty Ryzen 7800X3D, and we’ve surely got a recipe for success on our hands.
Yep, it’s all-out AMD once more—this system should tackle the likes of the Intel 13600K & Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 at a competitive price bracket. Sure, Intel and Nvidia capture the majority of the custom PC market, but no one should turn their nose up at AMD. They’ve not kept quiet, and with cheaper prices (on the whole), they put up a strong fight.
Although arguably the CPU/GPU are the two main components of a PC, the rest of the build is always fun to spec out. We’re piecing together this machine in a very fetching case from BeQuiet. Usually, we don’t like being told what to do, but they seem pretty adamant that we should zip our mouths and let the case do the talking. Terrible company name puns aside, the Shadow Base 800 FX from BeQuiet is a very pretty chassis to house our mid-range AMD system. It provides premium style, with form and function also at the forefront. In its white guise, it should pair perfectly with our NZXT N7 B650E motherboard. The RGB from the case and our TEAMGROUP T-Force Delta TUF Gaming Alliance DDR5 RAM should also pop in contrast to it, creating a strong glow inside and outside the case.
Costing around $2,000, we’re hoping that this system is more than good enough to provide a solid QHD gaming experience with enough oomph to be a powerful productivity machine on the side, too. We know the latter is the most important, but we all want to know how this thing can game, right? We have high hopes, and should expect upward of 100 FPS running on ultra settings at QHD resolution—fingers crossed, anyway.
CPU
Theoretically, there are higher-spec AMD CPUs. In practice? Not for gaming. That’s because of AMD’s 3D V-cache equipped CPUs, only the 7800X3D has a single CPU die. The more expensive alternatives run an asymmetric dual-die config—one die with cache, the other without. That can compromise frame rates.
• $390
GPU
It’s been a long time coming, but AMD’s mid-range RX 7000 GPU has arrived. It’s not much of a step over the old 6800 XT.
Arguably, it should really be called the 7800 non-XT, but it does make for a compelling price-to-performance proposition. For most games most of the time, it’s comfortably faster than an Nvidia RTX 4070.
• $499
MOTHERBOARD
If it’s that slick Stormtrooper aesthetic that gets you going, you can
