About a month ago, we saw an Alienware gaming PC with an RTX 3080 heavily discounted to $1500 (opens in new tab). However, this level of gaming performance is likely to stay in this price range, as the standard price for this ABS Stratos Aqua PC is $1500 today on Newegg (opens in new tab).

This is all thanks to the RTX 4070 (opens in new tab), which was released last week and is being installed in affordable gaming PCs this week; this GPU in the ABS Stratos Aqua rig delivers the same level of gaming performance as an RTX 3080-based machine, and is capable of delivering the same level of gaming performance as an RTX 3080-based machine, and even gives it the potential to exceed it.

Even though the rasterized gaming performance of the RTX 4070 and RTX 3080 are nearly identical, the new Ada GPU has the potential to go even further in terms of future gaming performance due to the availability of DLSS 3.0 and Frame Generation Nvidia's AI Frame The wonders of interpolation technology can feed frames that are not fully rendered into a game's output, making a huge difference in the overall smoothness of supported titles.

The ABS rig ostensibly has a lower-end CPU than the aforementioned Alienware machines, an Intel Core i5 13400F (open in new tab). However, the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X is an 8-core, 16-thread chip, whereas the Intel processor is a 6+4 core hybrid CPU, also with 16 threads.

But it still outperforms the previous generation of AMD chips and more than adequately supports Nvidia graphics cards. the ABS machine also has 16GB of memory, but this time DDR5-5600 instead of DDR4-3200, and 1TB of NVMe SSD storage The machine is also equipped with 1TB of NVMe SSD storage.

Frankly, there is nothing to discourage us from recommending this as an overpriced, high-performance gaming PC. The air-cooled cooler would be fine for a Core i5 13400F, and the 700W 80+ Gold power supply is properly equipped.

This is the standard retail price for the ABS Stratos Aqua, as it is not currently available at a discount. This suggests that this type of gaming performance will be seen below the $1,500 mark when the bargain season comes around.