NVIDIA Thermaltake LCGS View 9870M-380 Gaming Desktop Review

Buy this if you want a stunning glass showpiece for your room. For pure gaming performance per dollar, look elsewhere. The RTX 5070 is great, but the rest of the specs don't justify the $2,200 price tag.

The Thermaltake LCGS View 9870M-380 is a gaming desktop that puts all its chips on the table, and that table is made of glass. The one thing you need to know? It's a showpiece first, a powerhouse second. You're paying a premium for that dual-chamber, edge-to-edge tempered glass aesthetic, and the specs inside are solid but not class-leading. The RTX 5070 and 32GB of DDR5 are great, but that AMD 9800X CPU lands in a surprisingly low 32nd percentile in our database, which tells you this rig is built more for looks than all-out, no-compromise performance.

The performance story here is a bit of a mixed bag, and the CPU is the surprise letdown. For a $2,200 machine with a fancy 360mm liquid cooler, we expected the AMD 9800X to be a monster. Instead, its benchmark scores put it in the bottom third of comparable chips. The GPU is the star, with the RTX 5070 hitting the 83rd percentile, so your games will look fantastic. But that CPU bottleneck means you might not be hitting the ultra-high frame rates in CPU-intensive titles that you'd expect at this price. The 2TB SSD and 32GB of RAM are excellent, no complaints there.

At $2,200, the value proposition is tough. You're not getting the best performance for your money. A significant chunk of the cost is wrapped up in that flashy glass case and the liquid cooling setup. If pure frames-per-dollar is your metric, there are better deals out there. This is for someone who values the visual spectacle as much as the gaming performance.

Compared directly, the HP Omen 45L often delivers better-balanced specs for similar money, with a stronger focus on CPU and GPU synergy. The Alienware Aurora R16 is another key competitor; it usually has better thermal engineering (despite the looks) and often better reliability scores, though you'll pay the 'Alienware tax'. If you want a clean, pre-built with less flash and more consistent performance, the Lenovo Legion Tower series typically offers better value by cutting the aesthetic frills and putting the budget into the core components.

If you're looking for the highest frame rates and best performance at a $2,200 budget, this isn't it. Go get an HP Omen 45L or build a custom PC with a better CPU/GPU balance. Also, if you ever need to move your PC, skip this—it's a 33-pound glass tank.

We can only recommend the Thermaltake LCGS View 9870M-380 if your top priority is having the best-looking PC on your desk. It's a gorgeous set piece with a very good GPU. But for serious gamers who care more about performance metrics than aesthetics, the underperforming CPU and questionable reliability metrics make this a hard sell. You're buying a show car, not a track monster.