RAM and SSDs usually suck in prebuilt gaming PCs, but this custom build shows that doesn't need to be the case, even in a pricing apocalypse

Reviewing a custom-built gaming PC isn't the easiest. In many ways, I have two things to review here. Not only am I reviewing a gaming PC like I would any regular old prebuilt system, but that doesn't feel as important as it usually does, because the machine you create could end up totally different. In fact, the real job I have when reviewing one of Quoted Tech's custom builds is putting this brand's configuration menus through their paces to make sure it's offering you the best parts it can.

When the friendly folks from Quoted Tech reached out to me with the offer to build me a custom machine to review, I was obviously excited. That claim of being able to create a PC that suits me and my preferences would be alluring to any PC gamer, let alone a hardware editor who gets a little too giddy at the idea of being able to piece together components like a "create your own pizza" menu.

The TLDR for this review is that, while Quoted Tech couldn't match my dream PC exactly, it was able to make me something that held up functionally and can keep up with my demands (let alone the intensive benchmarking I've put it through for this review). Where Quoted Tech's builder might feel slightly more limited than other brands I've scoped out when offering a custom selection of components, it makes up for it with a selection of parts from a few brands that are much better quality across the board. When making your pizza, would you rather have a selection of seven different okay cheeses, or three well-priced, delicious cheeses that offered you distinct flavours?

Picking the parts

The initial elevator pitch I was sent by Quoted Tech was pretty darn exciting, and I'm not sure if what I tasked the brand with in the end was less creative and just a bit boring, but I feel like what I ended up with for this review wasn't quite as novel as it could have been.

Quoted Tech told me about how the custom builder for its PCs was so thorough that it could offer anything I put my mind to, including a “'Retro RGB Revival' build showcasing custom aesthetics and cable art, a modular futureproof unit with easily swappable parts, open-frame design, minimal adhesives, and upgrade planning, or, a “living PC” that integrates terrarium elements or a nature-themed case".

I'm a pretty simple guy; I don't have much desire for a retro-style system or terrarium elements, but as my review of the Acer Predator Orion X will tell you, I do like desktop PCs that can actually fit on a desktop and don't take up the whole worktop. Besides that, I knew I wanted to test an AMD build that included the RX 9070 XT graphics card since I had yet to go hands-on with it. Those were really my main asks, and while I'm happy the specs were more than met, I am a little miffed that one physical ask I was not. If anything, this really shows the biggest issue and greatest strength with Quoted Tech's custom builder.

The motherboard and case for this system are both regular ATX size, and although they're not on the larger end of that weight class, a look through Quoted Tech's full custom parts configurator shows that there aren't any micro-ATX or ITX motherboards and cases to choose from. That's a shame, because for folks like me who'd say their dream build is on the smaller size, I feel like Quoted Tech can't really follow through on its promises.

While frustrating for me and my niche preferences, that doesn't really detract from what is a pretty conclusive custom builder menu with a solid selection of parts, aesthetics, and (a few) budgets. Cases span from Fractal's Pop Airs through to MSI's PANOs, to HYTE's colorful Y options, and even Corsair's Frames. There's a solid selection at play here, and I'm sure if you have more adventurous custom PC building dreams than I do, Quoted Tech will be more than capable of making something bespoke to them. And that includes chassis fans and cabling too. The aesthetics do feel yours to create if you build from scratch.

In terms of components, I'm a fan of the fact that there's a smaller pool of brands to choose from when it comes to memory and storage. Kingston memory and SSDs are tried and tested, good value (even with ongoing RAM shortages and inflation), and what's more, they're good quality. I'm not sure if Quoted Tech is planning on expanding its partnerships to other component makers in the future, but in this instance, I think a smaller pool of well-known brands (Kingston and Western Digital) is actually going to be more helpful for first-time PC buyers than a larger selection of lesser-known names they need to quality check online themselves.

Specs

So what did I end up with, I hear you ask? From recreating the build on Quoted Tech's website, it seems my build springs from one of the company's prebuilt-opt-up configurations, called the Horizon. There's also the Frontier and Great North, and with any of these, you can start with a platform of selected options and customize to your liking. Alternatively, you can start with noting and build what you like. The Horizon is Quoted Tech's middle tier of gaming PC, which is available from $2,272 and up when you begin to customize it.

From recreating my specs using the options on its website, I've come out with a build that currently costs $2,497, which might give you an idea of the kind of value for money you get.

From a glance at PCPartsPicker, the price of an equivalent DIY PC with these specs tops out at ~$2,137.94, which leaves a roughly $360 builders' fee that will presumably go toward shipping, warranties, and the company itself taking a cut. Take this with a pinch of salt, especially in 2026 when the cost of PC hardware is through the roof and fluctuating by the day, but that is one of the larger builders' fees I've seen from PC brands recently, so there are definitely cheaper ways to go about grabbing a gaming PC. That said, while it's a more expensive way to go about things, a custom build does get you the best of both worlds between not building and controlling what's inside your machine.

Where the smaller pool of parts does come into play is when you're trying to keep costs down. The benefit of having lots of different brands to choose from when configuring a custom build is that you can prioritise what's important to you. If you want a cheaper, budget brand SSD or RAM, you can choose those things. With a limited pool in those areas with Quoted Tech, the quality assurance does offset your ability to save where you feel you'd like to.

Design

Now that all of the Quoted Tech custom build stuff is out of the way, let's get onto talking about the actual PC I've been sent. Let's start with the MSI Pano 110R chassis, which has a transparent tempered glass panel on its front and side, with room for intake fans on the front of the opposite side. There's a generous PSU tray and plenty of space in the top for the 360mm AIO cooler, and overall, there's a decent use of space here. I'm always hesitant about the airflow in cases that pull air in through a side wall like this as opposed to straight forward front-to-back airflow, but as I'll come on to, cooling was excellent in this rig.

In terms of size, the Pano 110R feels fairly narrow, which may please folks like me who prefer a slimmer case, but it does feel tall, and that might present difficulties fitting it underneath your desk, or on top of a standing desk, depending on your setup.

There's some personality to this machine as well, with RGB highlights that frame the transparent borders. Quoted Tech's magnetic pump head cap on the CPU cooler gives it some identity as well, while not going too overt with branding, as you might see with some system configurators.

Connectivity isn't bad, but for the money, you could get better motherboard connectivity. On the rear IO, you have five USB-A ports along with two USB-C. On the front of the case, there are an additional two USB-A and one more USB-C.

In terms of build quality, everything is really neatly arranged, and everything worked out of the box. I do have one gripe, however, and I'm unsure if it's a result of a lack of testing before the PC was shipped, or something moved around in transit. The PC is louder than I'd like, and not because of the generous number of case fans included in the build. In fact, these are decent fans, and add loads of colorful RGB to the mix. What I noticed straight out of the box is that something sounds as though it's either not properly bolted into the chassis or something is ever so slightly caught in the fan blades. Either way, it's causing a very annoying whirring sound which, even when idling, is loud enough to be distracting.

It's hard to know what to criticize here, especially seeing as I've done the best I can to find the source of it and haven't been able to find a clear culprit. I must admit though, when paying this much for a custom machine, I wouldn't want to have to deal with this as an issue. Whether it's a packaging issue or a small dip in attention to detail, I hope it's a blip and not something you experience if you buy a Quoted Tech rig. It's tough not to bring up though, because rival brands like PCSpecialist in the UK and Maingear in the US have rigorous pre-shipping tests they put their machines through that they evidence in your packaging, and I'm not sure the same kind of customer service is present here.

Performance

Beyond a few out-of-the-box crashes and a bizarre case of Windows not defaulting to a fresh install when I first turned it on, this machine performed just fine. There was no bloatware to be found at all, and although some of those initial crashes and random restarts were fairly regular in my first day or two of testing the machine out, I'm confident Quoted Tech does a good job of giving you a clean slate to work from when you buy one of its computers. Don't fear prebuilt bloatware, because it isn't present here.

Having just gone back to test out the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX to see how it holds up in 2026, I was very keen to finally get my hands on the current-gen AMD flagship GPU. It very much forms the heart of this gaming PC from Quoted Tech. Combined with the Ryzen 7 9700F CPU, it's a capable 4K gaming build even without extending into the pricier X3D chip shelves. But how does it compare to the likes of the CyberPowerPC Ultra XT3D we tested on the UK side of the pond, or indeed the NZXT Player Three which houses the Nvidia RTX 5080?

When compared to those other systems we've reviewed with similar specs, this Quoted Tech build does come up just a little short, which, if anything, shows the value of an X3D processor. In both 3DMark and Cinebench tests, we can see dips in performance most likely due to the AMD Ryzen 7 9700F, even when the CyberPowerPC build we reviewed used the same RX 9070 XT GPU.

What I was very impressed with though, was how cool the Ryzen 7 9700F stayed during these intensive tests. In Fire Strike and Time Spy (which are known for their ability to bring the best CPUs for gaming up to boiling point), the processor managed to stay cool and under 58 degrees Celsius. For a sub-$100 AIO cooler, that's really impressive stuff, but it does show one reason not to go for an X3D or an Intel CPU in your machine. I didn't tamper with any cooling controls when setting up the PC either, so it does show that at some point along the building process, Quoted Tech had set things up for success.

Where Quoted Tech's build does outperform both equivalent PCs is in its storage and RAM. Like I've been going back and forth on in this review so far, there are ups and downs with the brand's somewhat limited brand options in this part of its menu.

Performance is absolutely an upside. Usually, with any prebuilt machine, custom or otherwise, the SSD is the thing that lets the side down. On the NZXT Player Three, for example, read speeds were down at 4,239MB/s, and in the CyberPowerPC, a similar 4,990MB/s. Quoted Tech has opted for Kingston's NV3 range in this build, and for a 1TB model, it's performed much better. A read speed of 6,274MB/s is hardly going to win any awards in the best SSD for gaming category, but it's by far and away much closer to the sort of gaming speeds I'd want from a "gaming" PC worth this kind of money.

Similarly, Kingston's RAM has come up with faster speeds in the AIDA64 Extreme test. At 58,432MB/s, and with two AMD EXPO profiles registering in its BIOS, I'm impressed to see memory this good (at a time like this) in a system that's been pre-configured and not built at home. I did my benchmarking with the RAM dialed up to 5600MT/s, and although I did try to clock it up to 6,000MT/s, it wouldn't train properly, and I had to clear the CMOS. It's maybe not the best RAM for overclocking, but it'll certainly deliver what most gamers need.

Following those initial tests to get a feel for the rig, it was off to the gaming trenches. AMD has recently updated its FSR power for the RX 90 series graphics cards, and having spent plenty of time testing multi-frame gen capabilities on Nvidia 50 Series cards, I was keen to see how things would compare. My go-to test these days is Cyberpunk, since the 2020 RPG has been geared to heavily cater to Nvidia's DLSS tech. My annoyances playing this game with the RTX 5070 stemmed from MFG ramping up floaty latency the more multipliers you turn on. AMD's FSR doesn't have quite the same frame generation prowess, but it can generate frames and upscale to provide a crutch for the power-hungry ray tracing that Night City deserves.

I didn't feel that floaty latency when running around Night City in Quoted Tech's build though, and honestly, it's getting very difficult to tell the difference in upscaling fidelity between FSR and DLSS. Even without the multi-frame gen tricks, I think the benchmarking scores here do work in the RX 9070 XT's favor.

In fact, the rig was able to nail two of the trickiest benchmarks for any gaming hardware - full ray tracing and no upscaling in Hitman 3 and Cyberpunk 2077. I've seen gaming PCs fail to get 15fps in these tests, or even crash. Even if 34fps and 21fps respectively might not seem all that impressive, that's actually a pretty good score.

When I turned frame generation on in that test in Cyberpunk, it did bolster the score from 50fps using FSR to 93fps, so there's plenty of room to gallop if you're willing to turn just a few settings down to max out a 120Hz or even 144Hz monitor. Not using ray tracing might also help, since frame gen boosted the FSR score up to 162fps without the more realistic lighting.

Should you buy a Quoted Tech Custom Build Gaming PC?

More important than the performance of this specific configuration is how the rig as a whole performed, because that's a more reliable sign for you to either buy or not buy from this brand. I'll say it; I've used better pre-built machines than this, which you can tell have gone through copious amounts of testing and quality assurance before they even get put in a box. I'm sure Quoted Tech has a process for this, but it isn't demonstrated with solid communication like it is by other brands. Thankfully, there's a decent warranty should anything go wrong. But at the same time, I've also encountered worse prebuilt PCs than this.

If you're happy with the selection of parts that Quoted Tech can offer, I do think there's a lot of peace of mind and reliability to be had with this brand's custom build offering. It might not be the one to go for if you're trying to save money because you're limited to fairly premium parts, but then again, it's up to you what you'd prioritise.

The build I received is of a really decent quality; it's neat and tidy, and it works well under pressure. I would have liked the fan noise not to feel as problematic, which may point to issues with the build or less-than-ideal packaging. I'd have liked a bit more in the way of customer service and crystal clear communication on the customer-facing side, since this can be a massive boon for anxious first-time PC gamers.

I can definitely recommend Quoted Tech for its selection of quality parts and its easy-to-navigate building menu. It's simple to configure your build down to the last spec in just minutes, and you won't suffer choice paralysis from all the options at your fingertips. If you're in the market for a prebuilt PC you have control over, I'd point to Quoted Tech. If you want the widest possible choice of parts to configure so you can truly save money where you feel like it, maybe look elsewhere.

How I tested the Quoted Tech Horizon Custom Build PC

I used this Quoted Tech Custom PC on and off for around a month before this review was written and published. In that time, I used it for work, benchmarking, gaming, and other tasks. I put it through all the same testing processes as other prebuilt machines I've reviewed.

I also evaluated the brand's custom building menu by using it to configure multiple different PCs. I used PCPartsPicker to evaluate the cost offsets of building from scratch to get an idea of the price. I also used other system configurators' custom builders to compare against.

For more on how we test gaming PCs, check out the full-length GamesRadar+ hardware policy.

For more on gaming PCs, check out the best gaming PCs in the UK, the best Alienware gaming PCs, and the best graphics card.