Chillblast Apex Ryzen 9 RTX 4090 Gaming PC

Not as stylish as the HP Omen 45L, but it's better value for money and offers a far neater upgrade path

- TIM DANTON

SCORE 5/5

PRICE £3,667 (£4,400 inc VAT) from chillblast.com

Before you shake your head at the £4.400 that Chillblast is charging for this system, take a look at the price of an RTX 4090 graphics card. At the bare minimum this will cost you almost £1,600, and a card designed for overclocking such as the Asus ROG Strix here won't give you much change out of £2,000.

If you're investing this much in a graphics card, it makes sense to back it up with the best gaming CPU and motherboard around. That means AMD's much-lauded Ryzen 9 7950X3D processor and an Asus ROG Strix gaming motherboard that sells for over £500. For cooling? A top-of-the-range Corsair iCue H150i Elite liquid cooler (£300).

It makes no sense to supply such components unless you're willing to push them to their maximum, which is why it's geared to do exactly that. It's also why it's a power guzzler, chewing RTX 4090 OC graphics through 133W when idle and 676W at peak. It throws off a considerable amount of heat as a result, so is possibly the world's most inefficient way to run Microsoft Word.