The RTX 3070 Ti is a fine graphics card from the last generation, itself not a million miles off the performance of the once-mighty RTX 3080. But it is still a $600+ graphics card and that makes it almost impossible to recommend anyone buys as a standalone upgrade.
But as part of a full gaming PC, well, it actually makes for a great new rig especially with this iBuyPower machine on sale at Best Buy for $1,500. That’s around the price that until recently was the preserve of RTX 3060 machines, and only recently has become the price tag you might expect for an RTX 3070 gaming PC.
The RTX 3070 Ti is comfortably faster than the RTX 3070 because it’s using the complete GA104 GPU. That gives it 6,144 CUDA cores vs. the older card’s 5,888 and uses the same high-speed 19Gbps GDDR6X memory as the RTX 3080/Ti cards.
In fact, that puts it above the AMD RX 6800 (non XT) card in terms of gaming performance, a card which itself was no slouch.
The rest of the spec matches up to GPU, too. The Core i9 11900KF (essentially the same as an i9 11900K but without an integrated GPU) is a couple of generations old now, but the eight-core, 16-thread CPU is still a powerful gaming chip, if a little power hungry with its 14nm cores. It’s not the CPU we’d rush out and build a machine around ourselves today, but as part of a pre-built machine it won’t let you down.
Nor will the 1TB NVMe SSD or the 16GB of DDR4-3200 memory, either.
The power supply is maybe the weakest part of the build. That 600W PSU will happily run this spec, but if you look to upgrade in the future, a new power supply might be necessary if you end up with a beefier graphics card.
Okay, hear me out…
This isn’t you’re only option, however, because if you’re willing to do a little light GPU installing, there’s another option that will net you an RTX 3060 TI-level gaming PC for just $1,080. You simply buy this GPU-less CLX rig for $690 and pair it with an RX 6700 XT for $350.
The main spec is essentially the same as the Ryzen 7 5700G is another eight-core, sixteen-thread CPU and you get 16GB of speedy DDR4 memory, and a 1TB NVMe SSD, too.
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