It wasn't that long ago that for $1,000 you could get a basic gaming PC with a mismatched CPU and graphics card, less than 16GB of RAM, and a combination of a small SSD and a large but slow HDD for storage. This ABS Cyclone Aqua is not only inexpensive, but has great specs for the price, making it ideal for playing Helldivers 2 at 1080p.

First up is the CPU, an Intel Core i5 13400F, the best budget gaming CPU available. It has six P-cores, four E-cores, and a boost clock of 4.6 GHz. Ideal for gaming, but more cores are needed for productivity and content creation applications. Intel's 13th generation processors support DDR4 and DDR5, but this processor has the former.

Rated at 3,200 MT/s, it is not super fast, but 32 GB in a dual-channel configuration is plenty of capacity. No game will require more than that, and by the time it does, you will need to upgrade your system anyway.

As for graphics, you can get a GeForce RTX 4060 Ti for $930. This is the Gigabyte Windforce OC model, and the OC bit indicates that it is higher clocked than Nvidia's reference model. Don't get too excited, though, as it is only 15 MHz above the standard 2,535 MHz. You won't be able to feel the difference in games, but at least it won't slow things down.

Since it is part of the RTX 40 series lineup, it supports the latest DLSS 3.5: AI upscaling, frame generation, and noise reduction for ray tracing. This is best suited for 1080p games, but with DLSS support, you can turn it on and enjoy 1440p games as well.

To ensure that there is enough capacity for all your games, there is also a 1TB NVMe SSD from Kingston and a second M.2 slot on the motherboard to pack a better gaming SSD into the system. The included SSD is rated at 3,200/2,400 MB/s read/write speeds, which is not fast by PCIe 4.0 standards, but much better than any HDD.

Rounding out the gaming goodies are the CPU air cooler, DRAM sticks, and the usual RGB lights on the front and rear case fans. If you don't like this stuff, you can probably disable most of it in your motherboard BIOS or by simply unplugging the RGB cable from the board. Before you do this, make sure the PC is completely powered off, including the PSU.

Of course, there are better gaming PCs out there, but they all cost more than this one. Forget about that and enjoy what you get with this ABS system.