An RTX 3070 Ti gaming PC for a price that makes all RTX 3070 ‘deals’ irrelevant
For $1,500 you’re getting an almost RTX 3080-level gaming PC with a Core i9 chip, 1TB SSD, and 16GB of memory.
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iBuyPower Slate MR294i | Intel Core i9 11900KF | Nvidia RTX 3070 Ti | 1TB SSD | 16GB RAM |$1,899.99$1,499.99 at Best Buy (save $400)I had to remove a couple of other deals from this list to make way for this one. It made the RTX 3070 deal we had posted previously practically pointless for the same price. No, this is the way to go: nearly an RTX 3080 PC for the price we’re often finding an RTX 3070 PC going for. The Intel chip is a bit older now, but it’s a powerful Core i9 so no complaints there, and the rest of the spec looks well rounded indeed.
The RTX 3070 Ti is a fine graphics card from the last generation, itself not a million miles off the performance of the once-mightyRTX 3080. But it is still a $600+ graphics card and that makes it almost impossible to recommend anyone buys as a standalone upgrade.
But as part of a full gaming PC, well, it actually makes for a great new rig especially with thisiBuyPower machine on sale at Best Buy for $1,500. That’s around the price that until recently was the preserve ofRTX 3060machines, and only recently has become the price tag you might expect for an RTX 3070 gaming PC.
The RTX 3070 Ti is comfortably faster than theRTX 3070because it’s using the complete GA104 GPU. That gives it 6,144 CUDA cores vs. the older card’s 5,888 and uses the same high-speed 19Gbps GDDR6X memory as the RTX 3080/Ti cards.
In fact, that puts it above theAMD RX 6800(non XT) card in terms of gaming performance, a card which itself was no slouch.
The rest of the spec matches up to GPU, too. TheCore i9 11900KF(essentially the same as an i9 11900K but without an integrated GPU) is a couple of generations old now, but the eight-core, 16-thread CPU is still a powerful gaming chip, if a little power hungry with its 14nm cores. It’s not the CPU we’d rush out and build a machine around ourselves today, but as part of a pre-built machine it won’t let you down.
Nor will the 1TB NVMe SSD or the 16GB of DDR4-3200 memory, either.
The power supply is maybe the weakest part of the build. That 600W PSU will happily run this spec, but if you look to upgrade in the future, a new power supply might be necessary if you end up with a beefier graphics card.
Okay, hear me out…
This isn’t you’re only option, however, because if you’re willing to do a little light GPU installing, there’s another option that will net you an RTX 3060 TI-level gaming PC for just $1,080. You simply buy thisGPU-less CLX rig for $690and pair it with anRX 6700 XT for $350.
The main spec is essentially the same as theRyzen7 5700G is another eight-core, sixteen-thread CPU and you get 16GB of speedy DDR4 memory, and a 1TB NVMe SSD, too.
CLX SET gaming desktop | AMD Ryzen 7 5700G | 16GB RAM | 1TB SSD |$769.99$689.99 at Best Buy (save $80)Okay, hear me out here. This isn’t the best PC to buy as it’s sold. But, if you were to pick up this machine, which has a pretty good eight-core CPU, plenty of RAM, and lots of storage, you could buy a graphics card separately and fit it into this machine yourself. My vote would be the AMD Radeon RX 6700 10GB, which you can pick up on Best Buy for$329.99. Combine that with this machine and you’ve got a really great mid-range gaming PC for $1,020.
ASRock Challenger RX 6700 XT | 12GB GDDR6 | 2560 shaders | 2,615MHz boost |$349.99 at Newegg (save $10)The RX 6700 XT is still our favorite mid-range gaming GPU, competing with the regularly more expensive RTX 3060 Ti from Nvidia. This is the cheapest version we’ve found today, and comes with a solid, dual-fan cooler and a decent price tag.
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Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he’s back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.
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