There are a few shortcomings, admittedly. In its £1279 build, for example, it only has 8GB of RAM and a 240GB SSD. Ideally, you’ll probably want to bump the RAM up to 16GB, and maybe add another SSD or HDD to the mix if you don’t have spare ones already. Happily, this build is fully configurable so you can do exactly that to get the PC you want. Adding more RAM only adds another £35 or so on its price, while a bigger SSD will cost at least another £18 depending on the model you go for. Still, even if you add another £50 on its overall price, just over £1300 is still pretty good deal for a full-blown RTX 3070 PC, especially since you can’t buy the card on its own for love nor money right now.
AWD TD500 gaming PC - £1279 from AWD-IT (down from £1597)
Indeed, buying a pre-built desktop is arguably the best way of upgrading your PC right now if you can stump up enough cash for it, as the ongoing hardware shortage means it’s still incredibly difficult to get hold of individual parts to upgrade your existing rig piece by piece. Instead, retailers seem to be saving what little RTX 30 stock they have for pre-built PCs like this one, which obviously is a lot more expensive than buying a new graphics card on its own, but let’s face it, it does also take a lot of the hassle out of building a new PC yourself. With an RTX 3070 under your belt, you’ll have more than enough horsepower for flawless 1440p and ultrawide gaming, and you also get the benefit of Nvidia’s DLSS tech to help keep those frame rates up while playing with ray tracing switched on. Simply put, it’s one of the which is currently my best graphics cards you can get from this latest generation of GPUs, and should be more than enough for the vast majority of you. You’re also getting an excellent processor in the form of the AMD Ryzen 5 5600X there, too, which is one of the best CPUs for gaming around right now as well. In my benchmarking tests, the Ryzen 5 5600X was just as fast as its more expensive Ryzen brethren in my gaming tests, so you’re really not getting a huge amount more extra performance by opting for the Ryzen 7 5800X or Ryzen 9 5900X instead. You might want to consider the Ryzen 7 if you stream regularly or intend to use your PC for lots of photo and video editing, but if you’re buying one mainly for playing games the Ryzen 5 5600X is more than up to the job. In short, if I was in need of a new PC right now, this AWD-IT build would definitely be high up on my consideration list. You get free delivery, too, and a three year warranty on parts and labour. If that sounds like your kind of PC, you better hop to it, as it’s likely to go fast.
