Viking Four | Radeon RX 9070 XT 16GB + Ryzen 7 7800X3D | Ready-to-Go Gaming PC | PC36

🪓 Viking Four

The gaming processor and sixteen gigabytes of Radeon, cooled by air and nothing else

Viking Four is where this range gets serious about frame rates. A Ryzen 7 7800X3D, which is still the processor most people should buy for gaming, paired with a Radeon RX 9070 XT and 16GB of video memory. Both of those choices are about raw performance rather than balance.

What has not changed is everything around them. The same walnut front, the same plain black fans, the same dual-tower air cooler and no lighting anywhere. This is a machine that will run 1440p at high settings in anything you point it at, and do it quietly enough to sit next to you.

The X3D chips have a large stack of extra cache sitting on top of the cores. It is not a general-purpose speed increase, it is a specific one, and it happens to help exactly the things games do most.

🧬 Built to last, designed to evolve

Built on AMD's AM5 platform, which AMD have committed to supporting into 2027 and beyond. This board carries four DDR5 slots with two free, three M.2 slots with two free, and PCIe 5.0 to the graphics card. The case takes cards far larger than this one and coolers up to 165mm. The power supply has 850W and a native 12V-2x6 cable, so a considerably faster graphics card is a straight swap rather than a rebuild.

📃 Specifications

• 🧠 CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D
  Click or tap for deeper spec info

  • 8 cores, 16 threads of Zen 4, with 96MB of L3 cache rather than the 32MB on a standard Ryzen 7
  • What the extra cache actually does. Games ask the processor for the same small pieces of data over and over. The bigger the cache, the more of that never has to leave the chip to fetch from memory. That is why an X3D chip can beat processors with higher clock speeds and more cores in games while losing to them everywhere else
  • Where you feel it: simulation games, large open worlds, strategy titles with a lot going on, and competitive shooters at high refresh rates. Where you will not: rendering, compiling, and anything that just wants more cores
  • Being straight about overclocking. The 7800X3D is not multiplier unlocked. The cache sits above the cores on this generation, which limits how much heat and voltage the chip will take. What it does respond to is Curve Optimiser undervolting, which lowers temperature and noise, and that is what we tune rather than pretending a multiplier overclock is available
  • Runs unrestricted in this build. There is no power cap applied here, unlike our smallest chassis, because a 155mm dual-tower cooler fed directly by the rear intake has the capacity to let it run
  • Socket AM5, and this board would take a 9800X3D later if you ever wanted one
• ❄️ CPU cooler: Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120, black
  Click or tap for deeper spec info

  • A 155mm dual-tower air cooler with six heatpipes and two 120mm PWM fans, in the plain black finish rather than a lit one
  • This cooler has a reputation because it deserves one. It performs within a couple of degrees of coolers costing three times as much, and in a series built around quiet it is the obvious choice
  • Two towers and two fans means the heat is spread across far more surface area, which means both fans can turn slowly. Slow fans are quiet fans, and that is the entire point
  • Both fans are fitted reversed, pulling from the rear intake and moving air forward across the board. The cooler itself is mounted the normal way up. A dual-tower fin stack is symmetrical so this costs nothing thermally, and there is more on why we do it in the case cooling notes below
  • 155mm tall against 165mm of clearance in this case. It fits with room to spare, which is not true of every mATX chassis this size
  • Mounted with fresh paste applied by hand rather than the pre-applied pad
• 🔲 Motherboard: ASRock B850M Pro-A WiFi (micro-ATX)
  Click or tap for deeper spec info

  • PCIe 5.0 x16 for the graphics card, steel reinforced and with gold-plated contacts. Gen5 x16 is optional on B850 and plenty of boards at this price are Gen4 only, so it is worth naming
  • 8+2+1 Dr.MOS power design. Plain English translation: comfortably more power delivery than anything this board will be asked to run. ASRock do not publish an amperage figure and we are not going to invent one
  • Three M.2 slots, one Gen5 x4 with a heatsink and two Gen4 x4. Only one is used here. Worth knowing: filling the third one disables the secondary PCIe x4 slot, which is a normal lane-sharing arrangement and only matters if you were planning to use both
  • Four DDR5 slots supporting up to 256GB, two of them free on this build
  • Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2 built in, aerial supplied. 2.5 Gigabit Realtek Dragon Ethernet
  • Realtek ALC897 audio, four SATA ports, HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 1.4 on the rear
  • Rear I/O includes a 10Gbps USB-C and a 10Gbps USB-A alongside four more USB ports
  • 8-pin plus 4-pin CPU power, BIOS Flashback, and diagnostic LEDs
  • Only one revision of this board exists. That is worth saying because ASRock's B850M-X line does have an R2.0 revision trap. The Pro-A does not, so there is nothing to check for here
  • PC36 only uses motherboards chosen for stability and longevity. See our Trusted brands page
• 📏 Memory / RAM: 32GB (2×16GB) DDR5-6000 CL36
  Click or tap for deeper spec info

  • A matched pair running in dual channel, with EXPO enabled before it ships
  • DDR5-6000 is the speed Ryzen on AM5 runs best at, and it matters slightly more with an X3D chip than without one, because the cache and the memory work as a pair
  • 32GB in two sticks, which is the right amount for a machine at this level and the right way to fit it
  • Two of the board's four slots are free, so 64GB later means adding rather than replacing
  • Specification guaranteed, model may vary. Happy to confirm the exact part on request
• 💾 Storage: 1TB NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD, TLC
  Click or tap for deeper spec info

  • Rated at 6,500MB/s or better, fitted in the board's Gen5 slot under its heatsink
  • A TLC drive rather than QLC, which is the change from the tiers below. TLC holds its speed through long sustained writes instead of dropping off once its cache fills, and it has considerably higher write endurance. At this price we think that is where the drive should be
  • We fit 1TB as standard right across the Viking range rather than varying it by price, so comparing our machines to each other is straightforward. The 2TB option is below
  • Two of the board's three M.2 slots are free, and the case takes three more drives besides
  • Specification guaranteed, model may vary. Happy to confirm the exact part on request
• 🎮 Graphics card: AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT 16GB
  Click or tap for deeper spec info

  • RDNA 4 with 16GB of GDDR6. A high-end 1440p card with genuine 4K capability in most titles
  • This is the fastest Radeon card in the Viking range and it is a raster monster. In games without heavy ray tracing it trades blows with cards costing considerably more, and the 16GB means texture settings are simply not a conversation
  • FSR 4, AMD's machine-learning upscaler, which needs RDNA 4 hardware and is a real step up from FSR 3
  • Standard 8-pin PCIe connectors, not 12V-2x6. Worth stating because it is often assumed otherwise at this performance level
  • AV1 encoding for streaming and recording
  • Being straight about ray tracing. RDNA 4 closed a lot of the gap and it is much better here than the previous generation, but NVIDIA still leads in heavy ray tracing workloads. If ray tracing is the thing you care about most, Viking Five is the machine to look at instead. If raster performance and video memory are what you want, this card is very hard to beat
  • The chipset and VRAM are guaranteed: it will always be an RX 9070 XT with 16GB. The AIB brand varies with availability, and we only use established manufacturers. See our Trusted brands page for more info
• 🧰 Case: Lian Li A3-mATX, black with a walnut front
  Click or tap for deeper spec info

  • 443 × 194 × 321.5mm, 26.3 litres. A micro-ATX case that is actually small, rather than a mid tower with the top cut off. It sits on a desk without dominating it
  • Designed with DAN Cases, who have spent years on small-form-factor layouts, and it shows in how much fits inside for the volume. Steel and aluminium, with real black walnut slats across the front
  • The front panel is decorative, and we would rather tell you that than let you assume otherwise. There are no fan mounts behind it. The mounts are three at the top, three in the floor, three on the side and one at the rear, and the front is where the power supply lives. That single fact decides how this machine is cooled, and the cooling notes below explain exactly what we do about it
  • Mesh side panels as standard, both sides. Lian Li sell a tempered glass left panel as an accessory, and we have deliberately left the side fan mount empty across the whole Viking range so that upgrade is a straight swap with nothing to undo first
  • An anti-sag graphics card support bracket is included in the box and we fit it. Modern cards are heavy enough to droop over a few years and this costs nothing to prevent
  • Two 2.5 inch mounts on the tray, plus one 2.5 or 3.5 inch mount in the floor
  • Front I/O is one USB-C, two USB-A and separate headphone and microphone jacks
  • Magnetic dust filter in the floor, and a second one behind the walnut slats
  • A white version with a lighter wood front exists and we are happy to build one. Ask us on live chat, there is no extra cost
• 🌬️ Case cooling: 1 × 120mm rear intake, 2 × 120mm top exhaust
  Click or tap for deeper spec info

  • This machine runs back to front, which is the opposite of most, and there is a reason for it. The front of this case is solid walnut with nothing behind it. Drawing air in through the front is simply not available, so we do not pretend otherwise. Instead the rear panel becomes the intake. It is heavily vented around its fan mount and it sits directly opposite the processor socket, so it feeds the cooler straight on
  • The processor cooler's fans are turned round to match. The cooler itself is mounted the normal way up. Only the fans are reversed, so instead of pushing air towards the rear of the case they pull it from the rear and move it forward across the board. A tower fin stack is symmetrical, so this costs nothing thermally, and it means the processor gets ambient air straight off the intake rather than air that has already been warmed by something else
  • The top exhaust sits forward, after the cooler in the airflow path, and the placement is the whole point. Put a top fan before the cooler and it lifts the fresh intake air straight out of the case before the cooler ever sees it. Put it after, and it clears the one part of this chassis that does not move air on its own: the pocket behind that solid front panel
  • Three fans, all 120mm, all plain black and all fitted by us. The second top fan is here because a Radeon RX 9070 XT puts noticeably more heat into the case than the tiers below, and the extra extraction keeps the air moving through rather than pooling under the roof
  • Nothing in the floor. Lian Li cap graphics card thickness at 61mm if you fit a floor fan, which rules it out on the larger cards. On the smaller ones we would still rather leave the floor mesh and its dust filter completely open underneath the card, so it draws cool air from outside the case rather than air that is already in it
  • No side fans anywhere in this range, which is a deliberate decision rather than an oversight. It means the tempered glass side panel upgrade never conflicts with anything we have fitted
  • Every fan in here is a choice we made. This case ships with none at all, so nothing in this machine is a stock leftover we could not be bothered to change
  • Fan curves are set by hand before dispatch and verified through our standard stress testing rather than assumed
• ⚡ Power supply: Corsair RM850e 850W 80+ Gold, fully modular
  Click or tap for deeper spec info

  • 850W against a build that draws around 510W under a heavy gaming load. A wide margin on purpose, and it means the graphics card can be replaced with something much larger later without the power supply becoming part of the job
  • Fully modular, so only the cables this build actually uses are fitted. In a 26 litre case that is worth considerably more than it would be in a full tower
  • ATX 3.1 and PCIe 5.1 certified with a native 12V-2x6 cable, so a current or future NVIDIA card connects directly without an adapter in the chain
  • 80 PLUS Gold, a 120mm rifle bearing fan with a zero-RPM mode at low load, and a seven year warranty from Corsair, which is longer than our own and unusual at this price
  • 140mm deep. That matters here: in this chassis the power supply sits at the front and its depth trades directly against how long a graphics card can be. At 140mm the RM850e leaves plenty of room, and we have built and tested this case with cards up to and including an RTX 5080
  • Fitted fan inwards, and that is an aesthetic decision we will own. Mounted the other way round the fan draws from outside the case, which is marginally better on paper. It also turns the power supply's ratings label, that wall of small print and certification logos, towards the side panel you actually look at. Turned inwards you see the plain face instead. In 26 litres with this much air moving through it the thermal difference is not measurable, and the visual difference is there every single day
• 🔌 Cabling: Black cabling, routed and tied
  Click or tap for deeper spec info

  • The power supply is fully modular, so only the cables this build actually uses are fitted. In a case this size that is worth more than it sounds
  • Cable management is the honest weak point of this chassis and we will not gloss over it. There is very little room behind the motherboard tray and few tie-down points. Getting it tidy is hand work rather than something the case does for you, and it is a real part of why a Viking takes the time it does to build
  • Braided cable extensions are available if you want the look through a glass side panel. Purely cosmetic, and we will say so
• 📶 WiFi / Bluetooth / Ethernet: Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.2 and 2.5G Ethernet, included
  Click or tap for deeper spec info

  • Built into the ASRock B850M Pro-A WiFi. No separate adapter needed, and the aerial is supplied in the box
  • Wi-Fi 6E adds the 6GHz band, which is far less congested than 2.4 and 5GHz in a busy household
  • 2.5 Gigabit wired Ethernet, which we would still recommend over wireless for competitive play
• 🪟 Operating system: As chosen by you from the listing options below. Windows 11 Home (OEM) is recommended.
• 🧹 Setup and optimisation: PC36 High-Class Standard. Full stress test with certificate, bloat-free installation, and BIOS set up properly
  Click or tap for deeper spec info

  PC36 High-Class Standard, included free with every build

  • Ready the moment you open the box. Your PC boots straight into Windows with a local account already set up. No account sign-in wall, no first-run questionnaire, no half-hour of setup before you can use the machine you just bought
  • BIOS updated and configured properly: manual fan curves, PBO enabled, memory profile enabled, Secure Boot enabled
  • Vanilla Windows 11 installation if you choose Windows, with no bloatware added by us, and all drivers loaded and ready to go
  • Full stress test with certificate. Every system is torture tested on CPU, RAM and GPU before dispatch, and ships with the certificate to prove it. The same test our four thousand pound machines get

  PC36 Premier Optimisation, available in the listing options

  • CPU tuning to bring thermals and noise down with minimal performance loss, plus a deeper strip and debloat of Windows and a hand-tuned fan profile
  • Worth taking on an X3D build specifically. Curve Optimiser undervolting is the tuning these chips actually respond to, and it drops both temperature and fan speed without costing performance. This is the optimisation we would recommend first on this machine

  PC36 Ultimate Performance Tune, available in the listing options

  • Advanced overclocking: memory tune, CPU tune and GPU overclock on top of everything in Premier
  • Memory tuning and a graphics card overclock on top of the Curve Optimiser work above. Being honest about the processor: the 7800X3D is not multiplier unlocked, so the CPU portion here is undervolting and boost behaviour rather than a traditional overclock. The card is where the measurable gain is
• 🛡️ Warranty: 3 years parts & labour (return to base)
  Click or tap for deeper spec info

  • Standard 3-year coverage included, parts and labour both. The same warranty as every machine we sell, regardless of price
  • Optional extended warranties in the listing options below
  • Every system is hand-built and stress tested before it ships, which is why we are comfortable offering this as standard

👁️ Transparency notes

• The 7800X3D is not multiplier unlocked, so our tuning undervolts it for quiet rather than overclocking it (click or tap to read more)

  The cache stack sits above the cores on this generation, which limits how much voltage and heat the chip will accept. What it does respond to is undervolting, which is what our optimisation tiers actually do. Anyone advertising a multiplier overclock on this chip is describing something that does not exist.

• Three case fans rather than two, because this graphics card puts more heat into the case than the tiers below (click or tap to read more)

  The RX 9070 XT puts noticeably more heat into the case than the tiers below it, so a second top exhaust is fitted. It is a change we make because the card needs it, not because a higher price should come with more fans.

• Airflow in this machine runs back to front by design, because the wood front has no fan mounts behind it (click or tap to read more)

  The walnut front has no fan mounts behind it, so the rear panel is the intake and the top-front fan is the exhaust, with the cooler's fans reversed to match. It is explained in full in the cooling section above. We mention it here because if you open this machine up expecting a conventional front-to-back build, it will look wrong until you know why it is that way.

• Cable management is this case's weak point, so a tidy build in here is hand work rather than something the case does for you (click or tap to read more)

  There is very little space behind the motherboard tray and not many tie-down points, so a tidy build in here is hand work rather than something the case does for you. Yours will be done properly. We are noting it because if you ever open it up to add a drive or a stick of memory, there is less slack to play with than in a full tower.

• No lighting and no liquid cooling anywhere in this range, which is the point of the series rather than a saving (click or tap to read more)

  Plain black fans, a black cooler and a wood front, and the only thing you should notice about it in a room is that you do not notice it. If you want RGB or an AIO, we build plenty of both, just not in this case. Ask us on live chat and we will point you at the right series.

• Product images are representative photos of a similar spec in the same style. Your PC will look similar but not identical. Our support team can help clarify anything you're unsure of. Images may show a glass side panel which is an optional quick-add upgrade

🛠️ Popular upgrade options

• Quick-add upgrades. This listing has a set of one-click upgrades chosen to fit this exact build, each one priced, in the Quick-add Upgrades section on this page. Memory, storage, optimisation, the anti-sag bracket and the extended warranty are in the build options instead. Anything not shown in either place, ask us on live chat and we will price it.
• Storage upgrade to 2TB: available in the listing options below.
  Click or tap for more info

  Worth taking if you keep more than a handful of large modern games installed, since several now run past 100GB each. Easy to defer, because two of this board's three M.2 slots are free.

• Memory upgrade to 64GB (4×16GB): available via live chat.
  Click or tap for more info

  Worth it if you work in video, run virtual machines, or genuinely fill 32GB. For gaming it does nothing, and we would say so before taking your money. Two slots are free, so this is an add rather than a replace.

• CPU upgrade to a Ryzen 7 9800X3D: choose it from the quick-add upgrades, or speak with us via live chat.
  Click or tap for more info

  The current generation of the same idea, and meaningfully faster in the games that respond to cache. It is also fully unlocked, unlike the 7800X3D, because the cache moved underneath the cores. Worth it if you are chasing very high refresh rates in competitive titles. If this is what you want from the start, Viking Five is built around it.

• Graphics card upgrade: available via live chat.
  Click or tap for more info

  The 850W supply and its native 12V-2x6 cable are both deliberately ahead of what this build needs, and we have tested this case with cards up to and including an RTX 5080. Worth it if you are moving to 4K or want ray tracing to stop being a compromise. Tell us which monitor you have and we will give you a straight answer.

• Enthusiast motherboard upgrade to X870: choose it from the quick-add upgrades, or speak with us via live chat.
  Click or tap for more info

  More USB, more M.2, USB4, better audio and heavier power delivery. None of it changes your frame rate, and we would rather say so than sell it as performance. For people who want the connectivity and know why.

• Tempered glass side panel: choose it from the quick-add upgrades, or speak with us via live chat.
  Click or tap for more info

  Lian Li's own glass panel in place of the left mesh one. We leave the side fan mount empty across the whole Viking range specifically so this is a straight swap. Worth knowing that mesh is the better panel for airflow, and with this card in the case that is worth a little more than it is further down the range. Still comfortable either way, and we would tell you if it were not.

• White colourway with a lighter wood front: available via live chat, at no extra cost.
• Extended warranty: available in the listing options below.
• Anything else: speak with us via live chat. You'll be talking to one of us, not a chatbot.

🎯 What is this PC best for?

• 1440p gaming at high settings in anything current, without thinking about it
• Competitive shooters at very high refresh rates, which is where the X3D cache does its best work
• Simulation games, strategy titles and large open worlds, for the same reason
• 4K gaming in most titles, with some settings judgement in the heaviest ones
• Games with large texture packs and heavy modding, where the 16GB matters
• A high-performance machine that has to look like furniture and sound like nothing

📊 Performance estimates

Figures are given at 1440p and 4K. Performance varies with game updates, maps, settings and background apps. These are estimates, not guarantees.

Fortnite - Competitive Settings (click or tap to expand)

1440p: 300-380 FPS
4K: 170-220 FPS
Native testing (no upscaling or frame generation).

Cyberpunk 2077 - Ray Tracing Medium (click or tap to expand)

1440p: 95-120 FPS
4K: 55-70 FPS
Upscaling set to Auto (DLSS / FSR / XeSS based on GPU).

Battlefield 6 - High Settings (click or tap to expand)

1440p: 150-185 FPS
4K: 85-105 FPS
Native testing (no upscaling or frame generation).

💬 Need help?

Not sure if this is the right spec for you? Ping us on live chat and we'll help you choose the perfect PC for your games, work and budget. You'll be talking to one of us, not a chatbot.