It wasn’t all that long ago when $1,000 got you a basic gaming PC with a mismatched CPU and graphics card, 16GB or less of RAM, and a storage setup that was usually a small SSD paired with a large but slow HDD. Well not anymore, and this ABS Cyclone Aqua is not only well priced, but has great specs for the money and is ideal for playing Helldivers 2 at 1080p.
Starting the show is the CPU—the best budget gaming CPU you can get, an Intel Core i5 13400F. It has six P-cores, four E-cores, and a boost clock of 4.6 GHz. That’s ideal for gaming, though more cores would be better for productivity and content creation applications. Intel’s 13th Gen processors support DDR4 and DDR5, but this one comes with the former.
It’s not super fast, rated to 3,200 MT/s, but there’s plenty of it with 32GB in a dual channel configuration. There aren’t any games that need more than that and by the time there are, you’ll be needing a system upgrade anyway.
For graphics duties, you’re getting a GeForce RTX 4060 Ti for your $930. It’s a Gigabyte Windforce OC model, with the OC bit telling you that it’s clocked higher than Nvidia’s reference model. Don’t get too excited though, because it’s just an extra 15 MHz on top of the standard 2,535 MHz—you won’t notice the difference in any games, but at least it’s not running slower.
As it’s part of the RTX 40-series line up, you’re getting support for the latest DLSS 3.5 goodies: AI-powered upscaling, frame generation, and ray tracing denoising. It’s best suited to 1080p gaming but in games that support DLSS, you’ll be able to switch it on and enjoy some decent 1440p gaming, too.
And to make sure you have plenty of room for all those games, there’s a 1TB NVMe SSD from Kingston and a second M.2 slot on the motherboard, should you want to stuff a better gaming SSD into the system. The included SSD is only rated to 3,200/2,400 MB/s read and write, so it’s not fast by PCIe 4.0 standards, but it’s way better than any HDD.
Rounding off the gaming goodies are the obligatory RGB lights on the CPU air cooler, DRAM sticks, and front/rear case fans. If you don’t like that sort of thing, you’ll probably be able to disable most of it, either in the motherboard’s BIOS or just by yanking the RGB cables out of the board. Make sure the PC is fully off, including the PSU, before you do.
There are better gaming PCs to be found, of course, but they’ll all cost more than this one. Forget about them and just enjoy what you’re getting for the money with this ABS system.
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