I thought I’d waved goodbye to gaming PC envy then this RTX 5080 and Ryzen 7 9800X3D build threw in a 32-inch monitor for free
Rig envy is something I thought I’d moved beyond at this point in my life, but gaming PCs like this one always manage to rekindle that envy inside me. And this time, it’s not just the PC itself—which has practically all the parts you might want for a truly high-end build—but also the monitor that’s getting thrown in for free.
Well, I suppose when you have a total price of $2,900 (at Newegg), nothing is really ‘free’, but you’re getting a $1,050 total saving if you include the PC discount and the monitor.
The two components at the heart of this Skytech gaming PC are the Nvidia RTX 5080 and AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D. The former is nearly the fastest current-gen graphics card on the market, losing out only to the RTX 5090, a card that’s double its price.
The RTX 5080 is the ideal high-end card as it’s in somewhat of a league of its own (excluding the RTX 5090 and RTX 4090), offering above 60 fps on ultra settings even in the most demanding titles like Black Myth: Wukong. When it comes to less demanding modern games, you should be able to max those out at 1440p and still get well over 100 fps. 60 fps at 4K res and max settings is actually achievable in many games with this card, too.
A good GPU needs its partner in crime, though, and there’s no better one for it than the Ryzen 7 9800X3D. This is the single best CPU for gaming on the market right now, thanks to its copious amount of cache—3D V-Cache, to be precise—which games love to gobble through.
You’re also getting 32 GB of fast DDR5 RAM, which is ideal, and 1 TB of storage, which is less than ideal considering many games run up to about 100 GB of storage, these days. But expanding your storage shouldn’t be too difficult or costly to do when you start needing more space.
All of this (storage excepted) makes for an absolute beast of a rig and is about as good as you’ll find right now for under $3,000, which means it’s about as good as you’ll get full-stop. But in addition, you’re also getting a monitor thrown in that should be able to make good use of those frames being churned out.
The circa $250 32-inch Skytech monitor is a curved 32-incher, which is somewhat of a sweet spot for monitors these days (I say with yet more envy as a 27-inch 1440p gamer). It hits 165 Hz, which is a refresh rate that should actually see some use even on high in-game settings, given how quickly the RTX 5080 can churn out frames. It is a VA panel, though, which means that while it should produce deep blacks, it might lose out on a little response time (it’s rated to 2 ms) and have some ghosting.
For a total saving of over $1,000, this build and screen combo is without a doubt where I’d be looking if I had a phat stack of cash looking for a pre-built home. I’d get that storage upgraded ASAP, but apart from that, this gaming PC is ready to blast through any game you throw at it right out of the gate.
