How to build a white gaming PC 2024: part selection, deal-finding and much more
Benchmarks: Black Ops 6, Counter-Strike 2, F1 23, Black Myth Wukong, Homeworld 3 and Cyberpunk 2077.
So our all-white PC build with AMD's Ryzen 5 7600 and Nvidia's RTX 4070 Ti Super is complete - but how does it perform? To find out, I've tested it in six games at three resolutions - 1080p, 1440p and 4K - to see how well it fits different display specs. In all cases, I'm using what I would consider to be 'optimised' settings, favouring higher frame-rates in competitive titles but opting for a more balanced outlook in single-player games.
Given the mid-range CPU and more high-end GPU in this build, our focus is on more single-player fare, including recent releases like Black Myth Wukong and Homeworld 3, but we'll still want to ensure that performance in modern multiplayer games like Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and Counter-Strike 2 is up to snuff too.
To keep things simple, we'll dispense with the usual benchmarking graphs in favour of this performance summary.
In short, the faster RTX 4070 Ti graphics card allows for excellent performance overall, achieving a comfortable 4K 60fps in the most demanding games we tested (Cyberpunk, Homeworld and Wukong), while hitting high enough frame-rates to take advantage of a 4K 240Hz display in more competitive fare (Black Ops 6, CS2 and F1 23).
It is clear that we are facing some degree of CPU bottlenecking with the Ryzen 5 7600 and this class of GPU, and we'd ideally want to opt for a Ryzen 7700X, 9700X, 7800X3D or 9800X3D to maximise performance in Black Ops 6 and Homeworld 3 in particular. Experimenting with a higher TDP and PBO would also likely yield some decent improvements, and given our over-spec cooler, motherboard and PSU, we certainly have plenty of thermal and power headroom. We could also accept the CPU performance for what it is at the moment and instead increase graphical quality settings in these titles without performance loss.
Regardless, with the 7800X3D and 9800X3D seeing significant price increases at the moment, if you're considering a similar system then the cheap 7600 still makes a lot of sense as one of the best value gaming CPUs.
With our benchmarking done, let's move onto the conclusion to wrap things up with a look at each of our components in turn and how they've performed.