In the pursuit of serious gaming grunt, don’t make the rookie mistake of treating your PSU, RAM and SSD as an afterthought.
Considering the demands of modern triple-A games, it’s easy to focus all your attention on raw power when building a gaming rig from scratch, or planning your next upgrades.
While your choice of processor and graphics card are obviously important, you won’t get bang for your buck from these expensive components if you skimp elsewhere, especially on the power supply, memory and storage.
Just like a Formula 1 race car, the perfect gaming rig is a finely tuned machine, so you need to watch out for bottlenecks that can throttle performance. You wouldn’t drop a Ferrari engine into a Ford Fiesta, so don’t drop high-performance silicon into second-rate hardware.
The right power supply never leaves you in the lurch
An under-powered PSU is one of the easiest ways to cripple an otherwise great gaming PC, leaving you struggling with system instability, freezes, crashes and the dreaded Blue Screen of Death.
Constantly red-lining your system’s power demands is also a sure-fire way to shorten the lifespan of your power supply and other components.
The XPG Kyber II 850W is an affordable, next-gen-ready PSU for Australian gamers looking to upgrade to newer, power-hungry graphics cards – with the headroom to support up to an RTX 4090 or 5080 – or even a 5090 if your CPU isn’t a particularly power-hungry model.
Keep in mind, you’re future-proofing your power supply to underpin your next GPU upgrade, not just your current build. That’s why it’s so important to check your PSU’s advanced features before you upgrade your graphics, not afterwards.
Offering more than raw power, the XPG Kyber II 850W’s semi-modular design allows it to sport native ATX 24-pin, EPS 8-pin(x2) and 12V-2x6 cables, along with modular SATA/Molex/PCIe 6+2 connectors.
The native 12V-2x6 connector ensures you’re ATX 3.1 and PCIe 5.1 ready, plus prepared to handle the massive, sudden power spikes often demanded by modern high-end graphics cards.
Cybenetics Gold and 80 Plus Gold certification signifies that the XPG Kyber II 850W is highly energy-efficient and dependable, while the Cybenetics A- noise rating ensures your gaming rig won’t roar like a jet engine.
The best memory doesn’t compromise on performance or aesthetics
RAM is the lifeblood of a great gaming PC, giving your system a major shot in the arm when you need it most. Skimping on memory leads to slower loading and reduced frame rates, making games less responsive and putting you at a competitive disadvantage.
DDR5 6000 RAM, such as the XPG Lancer Blade RGB DDR5-6000 CL30, hits the sweet spot for gaming performance.
With 6000MHz performance, you can literally see the difference when it comes to the number of frames per second you can squeeze from your gaming rig. Many games will see a 10 FPS or more boost when upgrading from slower DDR5 4600-4800.
While refusing to compromise on performance, the XPG Lancer Blade RGB DDR5-6000 CL30 also ensures you don’t need to compromise on aesthetics.
While RGB DDR5 kits are impressive bling, many are too tall to clear large air coolers or fit small cases. That’s where Lancer Blade RGB comes to the rescue as the go-to low-profile DDR5 RGB memory kit for Small Form Factor (SFF) and air-cooler-constrained builds.
With ~33.8–40mm Z-height, you don’t need to trade off RGB aesthetics to fit in with your motherboard, cooler or case.
The right storage runs fast and cool
From booting up Windows to launching games and loading assets, fast and reliable storage is an essential foundation of any gaming rig. Today’s games demand high-performance storage for things like rapid level transitions, and quick game startup.
The new breed of Gen5 SSDs nearly double the speeds of their Gen4 predecessors on a compatible PC. The result is an SSD which keeps up with next-gen gaming, offering up to 14,000 MB/s read and 13,000 MB/s write speeds on a PC with a compatible motherboard.
The XPG Mars 980 Blade features all this, with a slim graphene cooler designed to keep it well-cooled for sustained high-speed performance. Once again, this makes it a solid choice for Small Form Factor and air-cooler-constrained builds.
Along with gaming rigs, the slimline XPG Mars 980 Blade is well-suited to upgrading laptops, along with increasing capacity for your PlayStation 5.
The PS5 accepts a second internal Gen4 SSD to expand its onboard storage, but the drive needs to meet Sony's exacting standards for size, speed and connection interface. A Gen4-compatible M.2 NVMe SSD, the XPG Mars 980 Blade is a great fit for the PS5’s narrow expansion slot which offers very little space for airflow.
Power up your rig
The ultimate gaming rig is a well-oiled machine, every component chosen with care. Adata XPG components hit the sweet spot for reliability, quality and performance when you need to ensure that every component has got game.