The RTX 5070's raw raster performance is roughly comparable to competing cards in its bracket. What separates it is the software: DLSS 4 upscaling plus frame generation regularly turns a 60fps native scene into a 120fps+ presented experience with minimal artifacting in supported titles.

If your library leans on ray-traced showcase games — Cyberpunk 2077, Alan Wake 2, Black Myth: Wukong — this is the build that gets you playable path tracing at 1440p.

The 8700F drops the integrated GPU and passes the savings on. For a desktop that will always have a discrete card installed, the iGPU is dead silicon. Eight Zen 4 cores boosting to 5.0GHz keeps it well ahead of the RTX 5070 in every realistic scenario, so the GPU is the bottleneck — the correct place for it to be.

The trade-off: if the graphics card ever fails, there is no video output for troubleshooting. Keep an old card around if that worries you.

NVENC on the 50-series offloads encoding almost entirely from the CPU. A 1080p60 stream costs a few frames rather than a third of your performance, and 2TB of NVMe storage means you can capture locally without immediately shuffling files to an external drive.