Nvidia's 40-series graphics cards are starting to show up in affordable gaming PCs. That means you can get an RTX 4080 gaming PC with these smart specs for $2,600 (open in new tab).

A high-end PC in 2023 is a big investment, and if you want the best performance, you need to be prepared for it. Fortunately, there are some clever ways to cut the total cost of a pre-built machine without sacrificing performance, which is what we like about this ABS Stratos PC from Newegg. [Take the CPU, for example. This machine is powered by AMD's excellent Ryzen 7 7700X, an 8-core/16-thread CPU with an eco mode.

In the words of the Ryzen 7 7700X review (opens in new tab), "The Ryzen 7 7700X is definitely one of the best gaming chips. When it comes to gaming frame rates, it keeps pace with the Ryzen 9 7950X and significantly outperforms the older Ryzen 9 5950X; its single-core clock speed of 5.55 GHz does just the job."

The Ryzen 7 7700X is also the most efficient gaming chip on the market.

Its efficiency is also excellent, which is good considering the 750W power supply in this ABS PC. This is the minimum power needed to run the RTX 4080; higher-end chips, especially Intel's 13th generation chips, would need a more powerful power supply The RTX 4080 is a card that we liked for its performance but were not attracted to for its high price tag. However, it is perfect for 4K and 1440p games, and its DLSS 3 frame generation is surprisingly good

, taking the rendered frames of a game and adding new frames that are completely AI-generated.

But GPUs and CPUs alone won't get you far. The machine comes with 2TB of NVMe storage, which is what I would expect from a PC of this price, and the 32GB of DDR5 meets my expectations. However, the 5,600 MHz RAM is not the fastest.

The motherboard is also very basic, but made by MSI, a reputable manufacturer; the I/O has eight USB ports, a fairly medium-sized number for USB ports. Wi-Fi is built-in, so there is no need to buy an add-in card.

Last month I found a $2500 RTX 4080 build (opens in new tab) that was cheaper than this, but it was powered by the previous generation AMD Ryzen 7 5800X, not the Zen 4 that is included here. To me, there is no significant difference between the two. Both offer something I can get behind and have good reviews with customers.