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High-end gaming PCs are expensive, even when 4th of July sales come around. For the most part, it's because so many of them house Nvidia's latest graphics cards, which are hideously pricey. When you slap an RTX 4090 inside a prebuilt gaming PC, people know it's the gold standard, so ludicrous prices seem somehow justified.
For the most part, you'd be lucky to find an RTX 4090 build for under $3,000, but what about the competition? My favorite graphics card on the shelves at the moment is the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX. It outperforms the RTX 4080, and it powers one of iBUYPOWER's beefiest gaming PCs. Thanks to 4th of July sales, this monster of a PC has been reduced from $2,999 down to $2,649, which is an amazing price for a high-end build.
For your money, you also get an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D CPU, 32GB of Kingston DDR5 RAM, and 2TB of SSD storage. I review the best gaming PCs and cover their prices when it comes to events like Prime Day PC deals, so let me tell you that seeing those kinds of specs at that price is not common.
Admittedly, high-end gaming PCs are overkill for the majority of gamers. Unless you have a massive budget to spend on them, the 4K, high-refresh-rate display to enjoy them with, and genuinely have a need for their power, you really shouldn't spend the money on them. "Mid-range" builds are stupidly powerful these days, and you'd be amazed at how capable they are at 1440p and 4K.
For those with an entry-level budget, iBUYPOWER has this RTX 4060 Ti build going for $1,299, which may be a more reasonable route into modern PC components.
Should you buy an RX 7900 XTX over an RTX 4090 build?
Ok, let's get the obvious out of the way. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 is a better GPU than the RX 7900 XTX. There, I said it.
However, as someone who's had hands-on time with both of these best graphics card contenders, I'd say that the 7900 XTX is very underrated. The RTX 4090 was arguably designed for way more than gaming because when this generation of GPUs was starting, people were still buying up Nvidia's 30 Series to mine Bitcoin. The 4090 is price-hiked, demands a lot of power, and you don't need to buy it to get incredible gaming performance.
The 7900 XTX, on the other hand, gives you all the gaming power you could want thanks to its 24GB of VRAM, and it won't force you to remortgage your home to afford it. Seriously, if you go onto any online gaming PC retailer at the moment, even while 4th of July sales are running and Prime Day gaming deals are preparing to emerge, you won't find an RTX 4090 gaming PC for under $3,000. In some cases, they'll cost $4,000, or even $6,000 at times.
When I reviewed the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX, I was blown away by the types of performance it gave me. There wasn't a demanding game I could throw at it in 4K that it wouldn't mock me for challenging it with. Being a hardware editor often means swapping out PC components pretty regularly so you can test the next thing, but the 7900 XTX was not something I was happy to part with.
The rest of that PC will give you plenty of headroom to max out your settings as well. 32GB of the best RAM for gaming running at 6000MHz, and a Ryzen 9 CPU with an X3D cache will astound you. For this kind of money, it's an easy recommendation.
For more gaming PC buying advice, check out our lists of the best CPUs for gaming, the best SSDs for gaming, and the best PC cases.
