iBUYPOWER RDY Y70 R17 review

Based on the Y70 case made by iBUYPOWER’s sub-brand, Hyte, the iBUYPOWER RDY Y70 R17 is a large but great-looking and powerful gaming PC that aims to deliver blazing-fast frame rates for a fair price. Available as a pre-built, quick-to-ship configuration, you can’t modify the spec offered here, but iBUYPOWER does offer many other custom systems, for if you want a similar overall PC but with precisely your choice of parts.

I’ve been putting the RDY Y70 R17 through its paces for the last few days to see whether it’s worthy of a spot on our best gaming PC guide, testing its gaming performance, non-gaming performance, cooling capability, and noise, all while seeing just how well-built this system is, and what potential it has for future upgrades. Read on to see if iBUYPOWER’s latest is the right gaming PC for you.

Specs

The big ticket item of this PC is, of course, its Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080. This makes up the bulk of its gaming prowess and accounts for nearly half the PC’s price. The model in our test system is an Asus Prime GeForce RTX 5080, though iBUYPOWER doesn’t single out exactly which card you’ll get when ordering this PC – it just says “GeForce RTX 5080 – 16GB.”

This particular model is a long, two-and-a-half-slot wide, triple-fan design that uses a single 12VHPWR connector. Its size and fan configuration ensure this card stays cool and quiet under load, and its fans stop completely when the card’s not being driven hard.

Backing up the second fastest graphics card in the world is, coincidentally, the second fastest CPU in the world, too. While iBUYPOWER does offer similar systems with the new 9850X3D, the R17 sticks with the 9800X3D. This is a sensible choice, as it brings the cost of the system down a little while only compromising the tiniest amount in gaming performance.

This CPU’s eight cores are also ample for general desktop work, so you’re getting a system here that, while definitely gaming-focused, is a great all-rounder, too. The 32GB of 6,000MT/s DDR5 is also an ample amount of RAM for most tasks.

The CPU is cooled by iBUYPOWER’s own 240mm all-in-one liquid cooler, which draws heat from the chip up to a 240mm radiator mounted in the roof of the case, where two 120mm fans cool the radiator, blowing their hot air straight out the top of the case.

Other cooling is provided by four RGB fans, with one mounted above the rear IO, and three mounted on the motherboard tray, in front of the right side panel, where they blow cool fresh air inside to feed the graphics card and the CPU cooler fans.

As is so common with modern PCs, storage consists of just a single M.2 NVMe Gen4 SSD. This one is a Lexar NQ7A1 with an ample capacity of 2TB. It’s not the fastest drive in the world, with read and write speeds of 6,000MB/s and 5,000MB/s respectively, but it’s fine for a gaming PC. The MSI Pro X870-P Wifi motherboard also has two more M.2 mounts for easily expanding your storage.

Speaking of the motherboard, it’s a full-size ATX model, so you get three spare PCI-E expansion slots, alongside the one occupied by the graphics card. It also has plenty of headers for expanding storage with SATA drives, adding further fans, more RGB strips, and USB ports. Its rear IO is also well balanced. The HDMI port is redundant – as you’ll use that of the graphics card – but otherwise you get plenty of USB-A and USB-C ports, although four of the USB-A’s are just USB 2.0 speeds.

2.5Gb Ethernet, basic but functional onboard audio, and Wi-Fi 7 round out its IO features, while the addition of buttons for flashing the BIOS and clearing the CMOS are nice little extras.

Powering all this lot is an iBUYPOWER 850W power supply. The company doesn’t specify the efficiency of the PSU.

Design, build, and setup

While it’s the RTX 5080 that takes the plaudits for the performance of this PC, when it comes to style and sheer presence, it’s all about the Hyte Y70 case that houses this system. As we explored in our Hyte Y70 Touch review, this case is a striking and sizeable unit, with it measuring 320mm wide, which compares to around 200mm for a typical tower case.

All that extra width allows for a host of great features, though. For a start, it allows for the power supply to be mounted behind the motherboard, where it’s completely out of sight. This also provides loads of room for you to be able to mount the graphics card vertically, as has been done here. Try to mount a graphics card vertically in a conventional tower case (which most don’t even support), and a lot of them don’t provide ample ventilation due to their narrow width. Here, though, there’s loads of space for air to circulate.

This wide, dual-chamber configuration also allows for the triple glass panel view of the inside of your case, which not only shows off your graphics card but also makes a spectacle of the RGB fans mounted on the right side. The choice of an AIO liquid cooler for the CPU also means the center of this build isn’t dominated by a bulky heatsink, but instead has just a compact RGB-topped water pump.

This case normally comes in a wide variety of colors, including this blue milk option. However, only the black version is available with this prebuilt configuration.

Still, it’s a great-looking system, and the case is well built, too. All the panels are thick and sturdy feeling, and the left and right main side panels just pull straight off, providing easy access to most of the case. There aren’t any outright luxury touches here, like brushed aluminum or hardwood accents, but as black steel, plastic, and glass cases go, this one’s fantastic.

Given the size of this PC, it ships in an unsurprisingly large and heavy box, so you might want a second person on hand to help you safely unbox it. Inside, you’ll find the PC and a wired keyboard and mouse, along with a few of the accessories included with the various components of the PC, such as the motherboard’s Wi-Fi aerial, some cables, a power cable, and the original CPU cooler mount for the motherboard.

Remove the PC, and you’ll find that it includes printed instructions mounted clearly onto its side panel, instructing you on how to safely set up the PC’s graphics card. The reason this is needed is that iBUYPOWER sensibly ships the PC without its graphics card installed in the PC, as the weight of this component makes it highly prone to moving around during shipping and getting damaged. Instead, the graphics card is mounted in its box and wedged into the case along with a couple of expanding foam inserts.

Unfortunately, despite these precautions, there was a bit of damage in transit. The graphics card retaining clip at the back of the vertical GPU PCI-E extension had snapped off, as seen below. Thankfully, this didn’t affect the build at all, thanks to the card being vertically mounted, but this does highlight the dangers of high-end PCs ever being shipped – there’s a reason the cases for PCs from the likes of Dell – such as the Alienware Aurora R16 – tend not to have glass panels and to have a lot more reinforcing structures inside the case.

Another minor issue was that the case fans weren’t working initially. After a little rummaging around in the back of the neatly-cabled case, I eventually worked out that the Molex power connector powering the fan controller board had come loose. With this connected, all was good.

With the shipping foam removed and graphics card mounted – and its power cable fitted – the PC was ready to have its power and other external cables connected, and the PC fired up.

Booting went without a hitch, with the PC greeting me with a standard Windows 11 setup. I’ll leave my rants about how awful Microsoft has made the steps that follow for elsewhere.

Once at the desktop, MSI Center automatically pops up asking if you’d like to install the various drivers required for the MSI motherboard, which is useful enough. However, there’s a fair bit of bloatware included in this, so be sure to check or uncheck the tickboxes for the features you do and don’t want. Otherwise, iBUYPOWER hasn’t added any bloatware of its own. You just get the pure dystopia that is the current state of Windows 11.

The other immediately obvious thing upon booting the PC was that the CPU cooler’s fans were surprisingly loud. Even at idle, they were ripping along at quite high speed and making for around 38dB of noise from around 75cm away (normal distance of your head from a PC sat on your desk), or around 45dB of noise from 20cm away.

I had to jump into the BIOS and find the fan control section to enable the smart fan control for these, tweaking the response curves to have the fans kick in far less aggressively.

As to the included keyboard and mouse, they’re actually perfectly decent. The keyboard has the responsiveness and feel of a mechanical unit, and its layout is compact but functional, while its RGB lighting looks pretty decent. The mouse, likewise, feels comfortable, and gets the job done.

I suspect those spending $3,200 on a gaming PC are likely to want to spec up some premium peripherals of their own, but you can at least get started with what’s included. A monitor and speakers or a headset will need to be bought separately, though. You can check out our best gaming monitor, best computer speakers, and best gaming headset guides for more guidance on those.

Benchmarks

Thanks to its RTX 5080, this PC is, unsurprisingly, an absolute monster when it comes to games. Starting where we always do these days when testing PCs, CPUs, GPUs, and more, our first game test was Cyberpunk 2077. I ran it at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K, using the Ultra ray tracing preset and with no upscaling or frame gen, and this mighty system coped impressively.

At 1080p, you’re looking at just over 105fps average with a really steady 1% low of 79fps. Meanwhile, at 1440p this does drop significant, but to a still very playable 67fps average with 55fps 1% lows. At 4K, you’re looking at just 34fps average with 28fps 1% lows, but a shot of DLSS upscaling at Quality, and this will rise to a playable level again. Similarly, if you want to experiment with the super-demanding path tracing mode, this setup will get there, just with a fair amount of upscaling required.

Moving on to Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and this PC cruised through this test, hitting 143fps at 1080p, despite the game running at Ultra detail settings with no upscaling. At 1440p this drops to 120fps, but even at 4K you’ll still get 96fps average. Again, enabling this game’s very demanding path tracing mode will require a significant amount of upscaling, and maybe even frame gen, but this card will get you a great-looking and playable result.

F1 24 is up next, and this is a slightly older and less graphically rich title than Indiana Jones, so we saw frame rates jump again. With figures of 170fps, 139fps, and 86fps average while running at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K, this game is a breeze for this setup.

Our final game test is Total War: Warhammer 3, which is an even older game with more basic graphics. However, its Mirrors of Madness test is quite demanding on CPUs, so is a good way to potentially show up PCs with entry-level CPUs. However, the Y70 R17 had no such issues, delivering solid frame rates across all our tests.

As for non-gaming tasks, in Cinebench R24, this PC powered its way to a single-core score of 132 and a multi-core score of 1,332, which is bang in line with the scores we achieved in our 9800X3D review. This story was reflected in Geekbench 6, where this PC scored impressive figures of 3,303 in its single-core test and 17,409 in its multi-core test. Meanwhile, it hit a massive 273,409 in the OpenCL GPU test. It might not be a multi-core powerhouse ideal for mega, number-crunching, workstation workloads, but it can hold its own, and it’s excellent for everything else.

Price

The iBUYPOWER Y70 R17 price is $3,199.99, making it clearly an expensive gaming PC. However, with RTX 5080s going for typically around $1,400, and the 9800X3D costing around $420 (literally just as I typed this it dropped from $470 on Amazon to $420), you’re looking at nearly $2,000 just for those components, before accounting for the $200 case, the cost of 32GB of DDR5 at the moment, and all the other bits you still need.

As such, while this is far from a budget system, and clearly iBUYPOWER is still adding a small markup compared to you just buying the components yourself, it’s fantastic value for a system that can be delivered, ready to go (fitting the graphics card and tweaking the fan speeds aside) in as little as four days, and comes with a three year warranty.

Verdict

The iBUYPOWER RDY Y70 R17 is not far off the ideal embodiment of a high-end gaming PC right now. Housing ultra-powerful but not needlessly top-tier hardware (such as an RTX 5080 rather than an RTX 5090 and a 9800X3D rather than a 9850X3D) inside a stylish and very well-ventilated case, it looks and performs the part.

Crucially, it also comes in at a competitive price and in a prebuilt package that means you don’t have to fiddle around picking out every component yourself and wait weeks for it to be delivered. Just about every part in this PC is one we’d recommend for anyone building a system like this, so you can just click to buy with confidence that it’s a really well-balanced gaming PC.

Crucially, while other pre-builts exist – and some can even be found for bargain prices when being sold off later in their life – most tend to be much more locked down in how easy they are to upgrade in the future. The likes of the Alienware Aurora R16 and MSI MEG Trident X2 are much more compact than this PC, but have limitations in what standard PC parts will fit in them.

The R17 also isn’t otherwise perfect. The case is very large, and the fact that the CPU cooler fans arrived needing some BIOS adjustment, so as not to be easily heard from the other side of the room, is a minor irritation. Plus, the fact that, despite iBUYPOWER’s best efforts and use of very sensible packaging, there was a tiny bit of damage, does expose the slightly higher risk of buying a system like this, rather than a more shipping-friendly but boring and less upgradable pre-built gaming PC option.