Given it’s nigh-on impossible to find a high-end RTX 50-series or RTX 40-series graphics card in stock anywhere, a pre-built gaming PC with an RTX 5080 inside it such as this Skytech one might be a good shout. If you’re looking for high-end performance, you could do worse than a build like this for ‘just’ $2,700 at Newegg.
I put ‘just’ in scare quotes because that’s still a lot of money to drop on a gaming PC—but if you’re looking for a high-end current-gen machine you probably already suspected as much. The truth is this Skytech Eclipse Lite is about as cheap as you’ll get a current-gen rig right now. And putting aside its lacklustre 1 TB of storage, you’re not sacrificing on much else for this $600 discount, either.
The AMD Ryzen 7 9700X is an 8-core, current-gen chip that pretty handily beats other CPUs of its mid-range-to-high-end ilk for gaming, excluding of course the 3D V-Cache champions, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D and Ryzen 7 7800X3D. And its multi-core productivity performance is pretty close to top-tier, too.
Speaking of the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, though, I highlighted an RTX 5080 Skytech gaming PC just last week, but that one has gone up from $2,800 (already $100 higher than this one right now) to $3,200, thus why I’m highlighting this Eclipse Lite for you today.
Yes, you’re missing out on the best gaming CPU, but the Ryzen 7 9700X is a great processor and shouldn’t bottleneck the RTX 5080 at all. And you’re getting 32 GB of DDR5-6000 RAM, which is the system memory speed and capacity sweet spot to aim for in a build today.
The main allure is that Nvidia RTX 5080, though. However you feel about Nvidia’s RTX 50-series graphics cards—whether you consider the Multi Frame Gen focus a genuine boon or a consolation for underwhelming raster improvements—the RTX 5080 is the high-end card to get right now. Unless you’re willing to spend double (or likely more than double) the money on an RTX 5090, that is.
And sure, the gen-on-gen pure rasterization improvements aren’t anything to write home about, but they are there. It’d be a different story if there were also tons of RTX 4080 Super graphics cards and gaming PCs on the market for much cheaper, but since those have been discontinued, the RTX 5080 is where it’s at.
The as-yet unmentioned elephant in the room is that with an RTX 50-series graphics card you’re getting access to Multi Frame Gen, which can boost frame rates to 4x what you get with native rendering. “Fake frames” or not, that’s a decent deal. Especially considering the RTX 5080 seems to overclock incredibly well—though as always, overclock at your own risk.
Ultimately, though, it all comes down to the fact that right now, pre-built PCs like this are the only game in town if you’re looking for a high-end build. When current-gen and previous-gen high-end GPUs are so hard to come by, $2,700 for a bona fide high-end gaming PC should look very reasonable indeed to those with the cash to spare.
