KITGURU SHORTLISTS: THE BEST DESKTOP PC OF 2025

There’s a lot to like about the U97 PZ Powered by MSI. The Project Zero ecosystem is the clear highlight here, delivering one of the cleanest-looking prebuilts we’ve ever tested. Cable management is excellent, the overall presentation is superb, and CyberPowerPC has done a very tidy job with the assembly. It’s a system that looks genuinely special when you take the side panel off.

The Ultra XT3D desktop is very well balanced when looking at performance. The pairing of the Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor and Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics card deliver impressive performance at 1440p with maximum graphics settings. Performance does expectedly take a substantial hit when increasing the resolution to 4K, but this is easily remedied with the addition of FSR and frame generation.

The Zircon Nova R desktop from PCSpecialist goes full AMD with a Ryzen 7 9700X processor and a Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics card... but how is gaming on an all-Team Red machine in 2025? Those components are paired with 32GB of Corsair Vengeance RAM, a 2TB Samsung M.2 SSD and a Gigabyte AORUS Elite WiFi 7 motherboard.

The specification of this CyberPower Ultra 5090 Custom Gaming PC is dominated by the MSI GeForce RTX 5090 32G Suprim SOC graphics card in terms of price, performance, power draw, thermals and aesthetics. In essence the rest of the hardware exists to support the graphics and if you don't intend to use the full grunt of the RTX 5090 in 4K gaming we have to wonder exactly what plans you might have.

Overall, the Onyx Pro desktop performed as expected and is much more suited to 1440p gaming, especially if playing competitive titles and targeting high framerates. However, it is still very capable of gaming at 4K, as long as you are willing to utilise DLSS and frame generation. If full rasterised gaming at 4K is your goal then you will need a little more grunt under the hood.