As component prices continue to rise you can still somehow get an RX 9070 XT gaming PC for $1,500

by adminMay 11, 202608

Just as I thought we’d seen the last of genuinely high-end rigs for $1,500, an AMD RX 9070 XT build has once again sprung a very pleasant surprise. I spent a lot of time at the start of the year harping on about RX 9070 XT rigs, because while memory shortage-induced price hikes abounded, many of these AMD gaming PCs somehow held out.

To give some context, right now you’re mostly looking at RTX 5070 and even RTX 5060 Ti rigs if you’re around the $1,500 mark. The RX 9070 XT is (very roughly) about 10–20% faster than the RTX 5070 on average, and performs about as well as an RTX 5070 Ti, excluding ray tracing performance and Multi Frame Gen (MFG).

I’ve personally been using an RX 9070 XT for the last few weeks and have been more than happy with it. Sure, you’re not getting widespread FSR 4 support, and I’d still feel more secure with Nvidia drivers, but for simply booting into a game and having it be playable, it’s fantastic. Whether you’re at 1080p, 1440p, or even 4K in many titles, you shouldn’t struggle at all to hit smooth frame rates.

Let’s talk about the obvious downside to this build, though: you’re only getting 16 GB of RAM. That’s not great for a high-end build, but it is a worthy sacrifice to get a high-end build for this price tag. Our Nick did plenty of testing to compare different RAM configurations and found, perhaps surprisingly, that if you’re only running games with nothing else in the background, in most cases you won’t suffer much at all from having just 16 GB of RAM compared to 32 GB.

You’re also getting a CPU that’s still pretty decent today in the form of the eight-core Ryzen 7 7700X. It’s AM5, too, so you’ll be good to go ahead and upgrade to a Ryzen 7 9800X3D whenever you fancy.

If you want to multitask and do some productivity tasks, then upgrading your RAM to 32 GB will be all but a necessity, which of course won’t be cheap during the RAMpocalypse. But for using as a pure gaming rig, this Skytech build is a genuine steal for $1,500.