but rather an AMD Ryzen 5 2600X paired with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti or RTX 5080, or alternatively, an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT graphics card. If you want to play F1 25 with path tracing enabled ...

I’m one of the consumer PC experts at PCMag, with a particular love for PC gaming. I've played games on my computer for as long as I can remember, which eventually (as it does for many) led me ...

Enter stage left, the Asus ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090 Dhahab OC Edition, replete with a massive cooler, a hefty base overclock, over six grams of gold-plating… oh, and a $7,000 price tag.

Well, as it turned out, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 does work with my aging build. I even have a 1000-watt PSU to accommodate the power shift from my RTX 3080. However, I ran into some snags.

The specs recommend 32GB of system RAM and an RTX 3080 Ti or RX 6950 XT graphics card for optimal 1440p performance with high details. The minimum requirements are much more forgiving, though.