After a hard day’s work, you deserve to kick back and relax with Maximum PC’s best-ofboth-worlds RTX 4070 for under $2,350

LIFE’S ALL ABOUT balance. Whether that means cracking on with some work during the day so that you can then enjoy some games in the evening, a good mix of both is needed to get the most out of life. Trust us, there’s nothing we like more than to relax and immerse ourselves in a fantasy world after a hard day’s graft.

With this build, we’ve focused on creating a great balance of components to provide you with a system equally capable of business and pleasure. Sure, a top-end system will also achieve this, but here in the real world, we thought it was important for this machine to land at around the mid-range price spot.

Our brain in the machine is Intel’s Core i7-13700K. This is one impressive chip, and although it can get overlooked often in favor of the i9 range of processors, this 16-core i7 CPU should provide our system with plenty of zippy processing capability. We’ve chosen to put this alongside a solid RTX 4070 card, specifically Zotac’s 12GB GAMING GeForce RTX 4070 Trinity. At $600, you’re getting a lot of bang-for-buck performance with this card, which has been difficult to say about Nvidia’s 4000 series so far. Working with the CPU, it should make a great duo for video editing, 3D modeling, and graphic design work, and it should absolutely blitz through Microsoft Word! Then, when all of your hard tasks throughout the day have been ticked off, and you’re feeling on top of the world, this RTX 4070 card should be able to provide you with some smooth QHD gaming, and thanks to DLSS 3, even veer into the world of 4K (if you turn the presets down slightly).

We’re fitting this all within an NZXT H7 Flow case, the best of the bunch from the H7 lineup in our opinion. It’s a classylooking case that also features excellent airflow. This should be able to keep our system running quieter, as the heat will be able to dissipate quicker than either the standard H7 or Elite, which don’t feature as many aerated panels as this model. With some RGB software tweaks, a clean white and black color scheme will be able to show off both a professional side and a sleek gaming aesthetic. With all that being said, it’s time to put this all to the test.

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TAKING A DEEPER LOOK

CPU

Intel Core i7-13700K

It’s our first time getting this CPU into a cover build, and boy oh boy are we excited. With so much love for the Intel Core i5-13600K, the i7-13700K adds two more cores to the mix, and takes the max turbo frequency from 5.10 GHz up to 5.40 GHz. It features the same hybrid architecture we’ve seen since the 12th generation of Intel chips, splitting its 16 cores in two. We have eight performance and eight efficient cores, as well as a total of 24 threads. This K variant also includes Intel’s UHD Graphics 770 if you’re GPUless—luckily, we have the RTX 4070. At around the $400 mark, the i7-13700K is not a cheap processor. However, it should last for a long time, and have enough power for gaming and working.

$400, www.intel.com

CPU Cooler

NZXT Kraken Elite 360 RGB

To help further with cooling, we went with the most premium release NZXT has to offer: their range-topping NZXT Kraken Elite 360 RGB. This is a new refresh of the Kraken line-up, and we’ve gone for the matte-white 360mm model to contrast against the black interior of our case. This cooler comes with a new pump header that features a 60Hz display at a 640x640 resolution. Overkill? Yes. Do we like it? Yes. Here, you can add custom GIFs and images, or show hardware monitoring like your GPU and CPU temps all through the NZXT CAM software. In the box, you get three F120 RGB Core fan which will provide the lighting to keep your machine glowing strong and running quietly.

$300, www.nzxt.com

PSU

1000W Corsair RM1000x SHIFT 80 PLUS Gold Fully Modular ATX

We may have gone slightly overkill here, but we’re thinking of the future. This power supply is more than capable of powering an RTX 4090 let alone our RTX 4070. However, we thought we’d add one in here now for longevity purposes—if you need to upgrade your GPU down the line for added gaming performance you then wouldn’t have to purchase another PSU. This RM1000x SHIFT is of course 1000W, it features an 80+ Gold efficiency rating, and is ATX 3.0 certified. One of our favorite features is the side connectors, making this far easier to build with. Instead of trying to feed cables through the back of the PSU in the bottom of the case, the side access is far easier.