Box Cube Mythic

If you want an RTX 3060 and have around £1,000 to spend, this well-balanced PC is an obvious choice

- TIM DANTON

PRICE £908 (£1,090 inc VAT) from box.co.uk

Following on from last month's award-winning £1,810 Box Cube Legendary Elite (see issue 333, p54), Box is back to show what it can do with a more limited budget. There's hot competition at this price, though, with Cyberpower showing what £1,000 could buy with its Infinity X123 Gaming PC (see issue 333, p52).

Cyberpower opted for a combination of a four-core Core i3-12100F processor and GeForce RTX 3050 graphics, but Box ups the ante here with a six-core Ryzen 5 5500 and an RTX 3060. As ever with Box, that configuration is adjustable. Head to pcpro.link/334box and you can save £100 by opting for an RTX 3050, upgrade to an RTX 3060 Ti for £120, or go wild with an GEFORCE RTX 3070 for £240. And you may want to select Windows 11 rather than the default Windows 10.

There are numerous other options too, including upgrading the processor to a Ryzen 5 5600X for £60, but few tasks will push the six-core Ryzen 5 5500 to its limits. This chip is particularly strong when you'll use all six cores and 12 threads, as shown by its scores of 289 in the PC Pro benchmarks (versus Cyberpower's 223), 9,762 in Cinebench R23 (versus 8,371) and 7,348 in Geekbench 5 (versus 5,870). But PCMark 10 gives a better indication of your daily experience, with both PCs returning almost identical scores: 6,760 for Box, 6,769 for Cyberpower.