NZXT PC without graphics card signals another step in chip shortage

NZXT has a bold new strategy for selling prebuilt gaming PCs: ignore the graphics card altogether. What may initially seem like a worthless PC is actually a good idea. NZXT’s $ 800 “Foundation” PC comes with some decent components including a 500GB NVMe SSD, 16GB of RAM, and a 650W bronze power supply. The part that makes this thing work is an AMD Ryzen 5 5600G processor. – or APU, technically, because this processor includes onboard graphics processing to run games without the need for a dedicated graphics card.

According to NZXT, the Foundation PC can run popular lightweight games very well. With medium settings and 1080p, it should deliver around 180 fps in League of Legends and around 70 fps in Fortnite. Depending on the games you play, AMD’s APU can be powerful enough to hold you back until you find a nice card like an RTX 3080 in stock.

You can almost always build your own PC cheaper than you can buy one, of course, but this allows you to avoid all the complexities of building, except inserting a GPU somewhere on the wall. the line when the chip shortage has subsided enough that graphics cards can stay in stock for more than 13 seconds.

The PC Foundation might also make sense if your current PC’s processor and motherboard are showing their age but you upgraded your graphics card not too long ago. If you have a nice card like an RTX 2070, for example, you might not want a brand new prebuilt PC just to upgrade that i7-4690K which doesn’t really cut it in gaming anymore. Pretty much every prebuilt gaming PC I’ve seen includes a graphics card, but maybe you’ve already got something better than the GTX 1660 Super that would come with a budget PC in the Foundation’s price range. NZXT.

I would always steer you towards building your own computer if you go with the upgrade, especially since you can probably save money by buying parts on sale during Black Friday PC Deals the week.

Seeing more choices starting to show up in prebuilt PCs is at least a minor benefit of the graphics card shortage. It seems unlikely that NZXT will be the only prebuilt company to offer such systems. Even though the pre-built ones are the best way to get graphics cards Right now, without dealing with scalpers, PC companies probably have inventory they can’t move when GPU supplies are so limited. Selling systems without dedicated graphics cards could help with that and give a few people a way to get an entry-level PC at an affordable price.

I also had a good laugh at the name Foundation PC, which implies that this NZXT system is, like, more from a computer. It will definitely hold up, even if it is not concrete.