PC gamers have been outright lied to for nearly a decade now. A new GPU gets
announced. We get super excited about the prospect of finally getting a decent
deal on a gaming upgrade. And then the actual price on store shelves turns out
to be hundreds or even thousands of dollars more than we were promised.
Well, I say no more. PC gamers deserve
fair pricing. And starting with this strongly worded email, I am going to
work tirelessly to convince industry leaders that
it's done. Great, Scott. You're right. You can
finally buy a GPU for MSRP. Who needs
this anymore? In fact, we got all of the
components of this system at or below MSRP, making now the best time to build
or upgrade your gaming PC in what feels like forever. We are still talking about
$1600 for this build, but guys, this is
a 4K capable gaming monster. So, if your
budget is a little bit tighter, we're going to have a couple of lighter weight options in our parts list to save you
some money without [music] sacrificing on quality. Now, here's a lighterw
weight segue to our sponsor
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It was GPU prices that inspired this build, but we're going to start with our
CPU. We picked the Ryzen 9600X because
AMD has been on fire [music] lately. Both in terms of performance, this thing
has six Zen 5 cores and boosts up to 5.4
GHz and in terms of value. With a street
price of anywhere from $190 to $220,
this thing is way below the $280 launch
MSRP, which already made Intel blue.
Well, even bluer. We also like the Ryzen
9700X for about $20 more if you do some
content creation on the side or if you want to future proof a little bit. But
most gamers are not going to be held back by just six cores. And besides, we
needed to save some money for our motherboard. Modern boards may cost a
little more than they used to, but even this reasonably priced MSI Pro B650A is
loaded with pretty much every feature that we really need. I'm talking DDR5
memory, PCIe Gen 4, both for our slots and our M.2 storage, ample cooling, and
even some stuff that we don't need, like ripping fast networking. To be clear, we
did make some compromises. If you were to spend, say, another 30 bucks on a
board that has PCIe Gen 5 support, you might eek out another 1% more
performance with a modern GPU, but really that's more likely to be a factor
with a future upgrade. So, we didn't worry about it for today. We also didn't
worry about spending a fortune on memory. [music] DDR5 was expensive back
when it launched, and industry insiders actually predict that it's going to get
more expensive soon. But hey, that's past and future Lionus' problems.
>> Oh my god, IT'S ALREADY HAPPENING. IT'S HAPPENING.
>> This 32 gig kit of Team Group memory was under $100 and it hits that 6,000 mega
transfer per second sweet spot that is just so sweet. You know, being a
commodity product, RAM pricing fluctuates so much that it's kind of
hard to nail down an MSRP for it. But this is faster than what was available
at launch and is only a third of the price. So, I think I'm just going to
declare victory and move on to another part that's cheap today, but expected to
rocket tomorrow. Now, we know this 2 TB
GM7000 is hot because the first unit we ordered got stolen.
Really? Really? We got empty box
scammed. I mean, I can hardly blame the thief. They probably wanted the two gigs
of onboard cash for himself so he wouldn't have to rely on system memory
for caching which can add latency. Anywh who, it cost us $120 and we didn't have
to buy it twice. Uh thank you Amazon for taking the L on that empty box and
sending us a new one. It's worth noting, by the way, that our B650A motherboard
has three M.2 slots, one of which is
routed through the motherboard chipset. We're going to be avoiding that one for
now and using one of these two slots which are routed directly to the CPU.
Remember guys, if you're ever unsure of which slot to use for your storage, it's
probably in that manual that you were trying to avoid by clicking on this video. Something you won't find in your
manual is what to do if your SSD includes a heat sink or a really thick
sticker that prevents you from putting the motherboard's built-in cooler back
on. In all seriousness, I have no idea if this voids my warranty right now, but
I really don't want this on here. Sure, there's a logic behind that, but I'd
rather have this now to put these puppies in their cage. Wait, that's a
terrible metaphor. Who'd want to put puppies in a cage? But if they did, for
just $90, the Fantex XT Pro Ultra is a
very fine looking cage with ample cooling for your puppies, a large side
panel window through which you can see your puppies, and plenty of space to
manage cables or show off your distinct lack of cables if you happen to have a
backto-front motherboard. We don't. Fantex is such a cool company.
They could pay wall features like this little nubbin that holds my motherboard
in place while I screw it in, but they don't. They even have plenty of room at
the top for a 360 mm radiator, which is
good because when I saw the price of the Thermal Rate Frozen, not 360, I had to
have it. $55.
How can they even afford to have decent packaging for $55, let alone a 360
millimeter all-in-one? Like, I've paid more than $55 for just a 360 mm
radiator. Never mind fans, pump, copper
plate. What is the catch? Just this. It
turns out it kind of catches here before
sliding into position. And even that can be easily rectified by simply moving
down this back fan and screwing it back in with your trusty screwdriver from
ltstore.com. This unit keeps our CPU remarkably cool
under load. Installs easily thanks to its use of the stock AMD mounting
bracket and even includes extras like RGB lighting and a tube of TF7 thermal
paste which retails for $12.99. That's it. Thermal right. You have
single-handedly irrelevant the rest of the category. Congrats. Moving on to our
power supply, we've opted for the CIC Focus GX750 ATX3.
At $140, it's not cheap, but it's 80
plus gold. It's fully modular, and it came highly recommended by our Labs
team. If you have some extra room in your budget, we also really like the
Superflower Lead X300 W. For about the price of a sandwich, that upgrade is
going to last long enough to see both your kids' first steps and their first
PC running GTA 7. Now, the moment you've
all been waiting for. The GPU you can buy at MSRP is
Damn it. Didn't drop it. The Asus Prime
RTX 5070Ti.
What? NVIDIA? I know, right? But the rules clearly
state that the GPU has to be at MSRP.
And while AMD's Radeon 9070 XT started
at $599, which would have been a perfect choice for this build, most listings for
it today are still $100 to $150 more
than that. And as much as I love to give NVIDIA flak for their MSRPs being too
high, at these prices, AMD sits with
both a technology and value disadvantage, unless you're a Linux
gamer. Now, you're probably wondering at this point, Lionus, what's the deal with
street pricing deviating so much from MSRP? Well, Jerry, let me tell you, the
S in MSRP stands for suggested, and that
S has been doing some pretty heavy lifting. Coming from the retail side, in
my past life, it is kind of hard to blame the board makers and retailers for
taking some margin when they finally get an opportunity to. The GPU market has
historically been notoriously tight to the point where EVGA's exit from the
market was driven at least partially by low profitability. But with all that
said, frankly, I feel like they've taken enough lately. And it seems like they
finally agree. Or realistically, it
probably has more to do with competition finally heating up a little bit in the
GPU space. There are a number of options right now for 570 Ti at $750. And we
like this card for its 16 gigs of VRAM and its strong 1440p performance with
the capability to step up to 4K if we're willing to compromise on the details a
little bit or use frame generation. But
what's even more exciting than this card is that we found Intel ARC B580s, RTX
5060 series, and even RTX 5080s all at
MSRP. [music] 5090s are still way more, but given how
many people are using those things for AI, that doesn't really surprise me. All
in, the MSRP of our system is nearly $1,750.
But we are deep in the product refresh cycle now and it's holiday shopping
season which allowed us to pick up all these parts for just under $1,600.
We're going to have all those links down below. Man,
how good does it feel to build a $1,500ish
gaming PC, you know, like we used to,
but not have to cut a bunch of corners because of ludicrous GPU pricing. Like,
it's still high, but it's not ludicrous
anymore. It looks great, right? Huh? We even got
RGB on all the things. Didn't even pay a premium for it.
You love to see it. Let's start with a game that's going to push our GPU pretty
hard. Cyberpunk 2077 at 4K. I've got my
details turned up a little bit higher than I would generally recommend on a
5070 Ti, but we can also cheat a little bit using DLSS. So, even though we're
outputting at 4K, we're rendering at a lower resolution, then using machine
learning to upscale. And wow, [music] I mean, especially if you were coming from
a console or something, this is a very playable experience with averages about
50 to 55 frames per second and minimums
in the 45 frames per second range. Sure,
we're not getting the most out of our 240 Hz monitor or anything like that,
but this is an extremely playable experience. I would think this was a
Christmas miracle a couple of years ago at the price. And what's really
remarkable is I still don't feel like we gave anything up. Like I can hear the
fans. They're obviously moving some air,
but it's not loud. It's not annoying. And
my GPU is at 65° with my CPU under 65°
as well, while it casually [music] turbos to 5.25 GHz. What a great system,
you know, the way it used to be. So, why
did it take so long for pricing to normalize? Well, it's easy to blame
retailers and blame board partners, and they did [music] participate in their
own share of price hikes, but what it boils down to is NVIDIA. They can
enforce pricing controls with their partners. I know this because I have
personally sat across from a boardroom table and watched them threaten to cut
my allocation if I don't adhere to their pricing. They could also reduce the
pricing for their board partners who make their cards. And finally, they
could allocate more production to their gaming cards, but instead they're
prioritizing AI, which I guess makes sense because otherwise, how would I
figure out if there's a seahorse emoji?
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