Building an RX 9070 GRE Gaming PC!

For a 1440p gaming build, you want a CPU that feeds the GPU without breaking a sweat or the budget, and the Ryzen 5 9600X nails that. Six Zen 5 cores and twelve threads, boosting to 5.4GHz, and it does the whole job inside a 65W power budget. At 1440p the GPU is doing the heavy lifting, so spending more on the CPU would be money better put towards pixels. This is the smart-money pick.

CPU Comparison

AMD Ryzen 5 9600X Desktop CPU Comparison

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CPU	::Cores	::Threads	::Base Clock	::Max Boost	::TDP	::Total Cache	::Where to Buy
AMD Ryzen 5 9600X Budget-friendly Zen 5 competitor	6	12	3.9 GHz	5.4 GHz	65W	38MB	$176.00 at Amazon Last updated: 2026-06-12 05:53:40 ET
Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus Mid-range Arrow Lake+ desktop CPU (Q1 2026)	18	18	4.2 GHz	5.3 GHz	125W	60MB	Coming Soon
AMD Ryzen 7 9700X 8-core Zen 5 gaming / productivity CPU	8	16	3.8 GHz	5.5 GHz	65W	40MB	$304.00 at Amazon Last updated: 2026-06-12 05:53:40 ET
Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus Step-up Arrow Lake+ desktop CPU	24	24	3.9 GHz	5.5 GHz	125W	79MB	Coming Soon
AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D High-FPS Zen 5 gaming CPU	8	16	4.7 GHz	5.2 GHz	120W	104MB	$449.00 at Amazon Last updated: 2026-06-12 05:53:40 ET

It also keeps build thermals low and easy to cool, which matters in a compact case. Drop it on AM5 and you are on a platform with years of upgrades ahead of you. The Core Ultra 5 250K Plus is another great choice and actually comes in cheaper for very similar performance. Future proofing is of course the issue here though with the latest Core Ultra refresh widely expected to be last on the current socket.

Alternative CPU Choice

Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus

If you want to take this build down the Intel route, the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus is the obvious swap, and it has been pitched head-to-head with the Ryzen 5 9600X as the new sub-£200 CPU to beat. This Arrow Lake Refresh chip packs 18 cores (6 performance plus 12 efficient) against the 9600X's 6 cores, so it pulls comfortably ahead in multi-core and content work for similar money while staying competitive in games. It boosts to 5.3GHz, carries 30MB of L3 cache, and officially supports speedy DDR5-7200. The big consideration is the platform, since it drops into LGA1851 rather than AM5.

Buy This If:

You want a stack of multi-threaded performance for the money for streaming, editing and heavy multitasking alongside gaming, and you are happy building on Intel's LGA1851 platform with fast DDR5-7200.

Main Tradeoff:

It needs an LGA1851 motherboard instead of the ASUS TUF B850-Plus, draws more power under load than the 65W 9600X, and steps off AMD's long AM5 upgrade path.

Is a 360mm all-in-one overkill for a 65W chip? Perhaps. For this price? Absolutely not! The Montech Hyperflow 360 ARGB gives you flagship-tier cooling capacity, three 120mm ARGB fans, and peace of mind, all for the kind of money that makes it a no-brainer. In this build it means near-silent temps and a centrepiece that looks the part through the O11's glass.

The obvious question is why go liquid at all when a decent air cooler would keep a 9600X perfectly happy. The honest answer? The gap is actually a lot smaller than you would think. By the time you have bought a good dual-tower air cooler with a set of ARGB fans, you are often knocking on the door of the Hyperflow's price anyway, making the jump up to a full 360mm AIO much smaller than it used to be. For not a lot more money you go from a rather unsightly heap of metal sitting over the board to a clean, low-profile AIO head and a radiator tucked neatly into the case.

The TUF Gaming B850-Plus WiFi is a well-rounded board that brings many modern essentials to the table. You get a PCIe 5.0 x16 slot for the graphics card, three M.2 slots (one Gen 5 and two Gen 4), and four DDR5 slots that support EXPO and overclock all the way to DDR5-8000 and beyond. It's an ATX board, so it makes full use of the space the O11 Mini gives you rather than leaving the tray looking bare and the aesthetics of the board pair well with the other components in our build today. Fairly muted but allowing the headline to components to shine.

It pays to be sensible when choosing a motherboard. For this build, there's no point spending extra cash on an X870(E) board when the TUF covers everything a Ryzen 5 and a single GPU need, and then some. The TUF Gaming B850-Plus WiFi is a perfect canvas to base our build around, focussing on the gritty performance over the flashy aesthetics and for that reason its the perfect choice for this build.

This Teamgroup T-Force Delta RGB kit is a favourite on the channel and will run at the Ryzen sweet spot of DDR5-6000 with CL36 latency (or less) very happily. That 6000MT/s speed lets the memory run in sync with the Infinity Fabric on these chips for the lowest latency, so you get the best real-world gaming performance without paying a premium for kits that the platform cannot fully take advantage of.

This particular kit is 32GB, the standard for a gaming PC in 2026. 16GB still works, but more and more titles, plus a browser full of tabs and a Discord call running in the background, will happily chew through it. 32GB is the comfortable choice that keeps everything feeling snappy. For those interested though, we did the testing between 16GB vs 32GB RAM in 2026, and the results might surprise you!

Storage is where this build keeps the budget honest, and the NV5000 1TB does exactly the job it needs to. It is an entry-level PCIe Gen 4 drive rated up to 4,500MB/s reads and while it won't trouble the flagship Gen 4 or Gen 5 drives on a benchmark chart it is dramatically quicker than the next best option, Gen 3 or SATA. The NV5000 will largely go unnoticed during typical workloads too. You'll still get fast boot times, snappy app launches and quick game loads. For the operating system and your most-played titles, it feels every bit as responsive as drives costing a good deal more.

Ideally we'd go for a slightly higher capacity drive and if you have the extra budget, 2TB would be our recommendation. 1TB disappears deceivingly quickly once you start installing modern games, and Windows. In and ideal world, it'd be best to treat this as your speedy boot and active-games drive, and budget for a second SSD as your library grows.

The star of the show and the part the whole build is designed around, the RX 9070 GRE. The GRE is AMD's newest RDNA 4 release, slotting into the line-up between the RX 9060 XT and the RX 9070 and rather aggressively taking the competition to the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB. Under the hood it runs the now standard Navi 48 GPU with 48 compute units and 3,072 stream processors, fed by 12GB of GDDR6 across a 192-bit bus.

This particular model, the Gigabyte Gaming OC, ships with a factory overclock pushing boost clocks up to 2920MHz, and a triple-fan WINDFORCE cooler keeps things cool and quiet. It also features a Dual BIOS switch for flipping between performance and silent profiles and a hint of RGB because why not!

The one thing worth keeping in mind is the 12GB of VRAM. It's plenty for the high-refresh 1440p gaming this card is built for, but it can become the limiting factor if you start cranking textures and ray tracing at 4K. We've built this system around 1440p, where the GRE is at its happiest and the value on offer is hard to argue with. Factor in FSR 4 upscaling and the 9070 GRE is a capable card and one that will happily play the most demanding titles at 1440p without issue.

Alternative GPU Choice

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB

If your budget is a little tighter than the Gigabyte RX 9070 GRE Gaming OC allows, or you simply want to be on Team Green, the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB is the obvious NVIDIA alternative. It sits a tier below the GRE for raw 1440p horsepower, so you will give up some frames, but it answers back with NVIDIA's full Blackwell feature stack, including DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation, plus a generous 16GB of GDDR7 that actually tops the GRE's 12GB for memory headroom. At a 180W board power it also runs cool and sips less from the wall, which is a neat fit for a compact build.

Buy This If:

You want to spend a bit less than the 9070 GRE, prefer NVIDIA's software stack with DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation, and like having 16GB of VRAM for high-texture settings and the odd bit of content creation.

Main Tradeoff:

It sits a class below the Gigabyte RX 9070 GRE Gaming OC for raw 1440p performance, so you are trading outright frames for a lower price, NVIDIA features, and extra VRAM. If pure frames per pound at 1440p is the goal, the GRE still comes out on top.

The O11 Dynamic Mini V2 Flow is proof that compact doesn't necessarily have to mean compromised. Despite the small footprint, it happily houses graphics cards up to 400mm long, a 360mm radiator up top, and a full-size ATX power supply, so you're never fighting the case to fit normal hardware into it.

The Flow part of the name means this ships with five reverse-blade fans and a slanted bottom panel that funnels cool air straight up onto the graphics card, helping to keep a lid on thermals. It takes ATX, Micro-ATX and Mini-ITX boards, includes a vertical GPU bracket if you want to show the card off, and uses Lian Li's signature dual-chamber layout that hides your cables round the back.

Add in the tempered glass and clean lines and you have a chassis that looks like a premium showcase build while staying refreshingly small on the desk. It's the perfect home for a system that wants to look as good as it runs.

The RM750e is a channel favourite, and for good reason. In our opinion it's one of the best power supplies on the market right now, and we rate it so highly that we use it in a host of our own pre-built PCs over at GeekaPC.com. When a part keeps earning its place in the systems we ship to customers, you know it has been properly put through its paces!

For this build, 750 watts is the sweet spot and not a watt is wasted. A 65W CPU and a 220W graphics card leave you with plenty of headroom, keeping the RM750e running cool, quiet and efficient with plenty in reserve, should it need it. It's fully modular, so you only fit the cables you actually need for a clean build, and it ticks every modern box with ATX 3.1 and PCIe 5.1 support, Cybenetics Gold efficiency, and a lengthy seven-year warranty.

The 9070 GRE only needs a pair of 8-pin connectors, which the RM750e handles with ease, but the RM750e also ships with a native 12V-2x6 cable. So if you step up to a bigger 16-pin GPU down the line, you're already wired for it and shouldn't need to buy a new power supply to make the jump. As always though make sure to check the recommended or minimum PSU requirements from the GPU manufacturer website.