Prebuilt gaming PCs can be a bit odd when it comes to CPU/GPU power balance; for 4K gaming, you want to spend most of your build budget on the graphics card, as long as the CPU is adequate. With this ABS Vortex-X Ruby, you don't have to worry about both.

The star of the show is the GeForce RTX 4080 Super. This is the MSI Gaming X Slim model, which offers a very gentle overclock of up to 3% via the MSI Centre app; the RTX 4080 Super is Nvidia's second most powerful gaming GPU, with only the RTX 4090 being faster, but the 2000 It is unlikely to be installed in a pre-assembled gaming PC for less than $2000!

Like all models in the RTX 40 series, it supports all the latest DLSS 3.5 AI-driven features, including super-resolution upscaling, frame generation, and ray-tracing denoising. For games that offer the option to use the first two, these can be fitted with all graphics options set to maximum and enjoy great frame rates at 4K.

ABS paired this GPU with a Ryzen 7 7700X processor, which is a thoroughly decent CPU all around with 8 cores, 16 threads, 32MB of L3 cache, a 5.4GHz boost clock, and a 105W TDP.

The good news continues as the AMD Ryzen chip requires fast dual-channel RAM to reach its full potential, and this motherboard comes with 32GB (2 x 16) of DDR5-6000. This is the ideal balance of speed and stability for the Zen 4 processor, and it is great to see it being used here; the RAM also includes RGB lighting, something not often employed in homebuilt PCs.

The power supply unit is also adequate, rated at 1000W, which is more than enough for all the components here and should leave plenty of room for power-hungry devices in the future.

Of course, to keep the price under $2,000, ABS had to trim the fat somewhere. The motherboard is an MSI Pro B650-VC WIFI II model, which is perfectly fine, but there are only two DIMM slots for RAM, no Gen5 M.2 slots for SSDs, and the additional PCIe slots other than the primary connection are physically x16-sized but internally 3.0 x1.

At least three PCIe 4.0 M.2 slots are available, one of which has only a x2 connection. But at least there is room to upgrade the Kingston 1TB SSD that comes with the Vortex-X Ruby.

You might think 1TB would be enough, but I would have liked to see a 2TB or at least a 1TB drive that wasn't as slow. This is a Gen4 SSD, but Kingston's NV2 models have peak read/write speeds of only 3,500MB/sec and 2,800MB/sec, which is close to Gen3 speeds. I would choose a faster gaming SSD to store all my games.

Aside from the slow SSD, everything else is speedy and powerful; for less than $2,000, you get a very good gaming PC.