Walmart is selling the ABS Flux II Aqua gaming desktop for $849, cutting $150 from its listed $999 price. The configuration is the sort of prebuilt that makes parts-list math annoying in a useful way: Intel Core i5-14400F, Intel Arc B580 graphics, 32GB of DDR5 memory, a 1TB SSD, Windows 11, an air cooler, an ASRock B760M motherboard and a 650W 80 Plus Gold power supply.
That does not make it a high-end gaming tower. It does make it an unusually dense budget box if the listing and component pricing hold. Tom’s Hardware calculated that the processor, memory, SSD, GPU and motherboard alone would run about $1,158 through PCPartPicker, before adding the case, cooler, power supply and Windows license. The same report put individual market values at $178 for the CPU, $400 for the 32GB Patriot DDR5 kit, $150 for the SSD and $309 for the Intel GPU.
Retail component pricing is a slippery little goblin, especially for memory, so the exact savings may not survive a different cart, day or seller. The basic point is cleaner: Walmart’s prebuilt price is below the cited do-it-yourself subtotal for the main parts.
What the hardware actually buys
The Core i5-14400F is a Raptor Lake Refresh desktop chip with 10 cores: six performance cores and four efficiency cores. It supports 16 threads and boosts up to 4.7GHz, according to the specifications cited by Tom’s Hardware. In that site’s 1080p gaming test suite, the related Core i5-14400 sustained 123 frames per second.
The graphics card is Intel’s Arc B580, a budget GPU with 12GB of VRAM and 2,560 cores. Future’s benchmark data, cited by Tom’s Hardware, showed the B580 averaging 80 fps in Assassin’s Creed Mirage at 2560 x 1440 on Ultra settings, ahead of Nvidia’s RTX 4060 in that test.
Those numbers do not turn the machine into a 4K monster. They do suggest a sensible target: 1080p gaming with headroom, and some 1440p play depending on the game and settings. The 12GB of VRAM is also a useful buffer in a price class where 8GB cards still hang around like bad firmware.
The Steam Machine comparison
Tom’s Hardware framed the ABS desktop as a lower-cost alternative to a Steam Machine-style couch gaming PC. The comparison is mostly about value density. The report cites a $1,049 Steam Machine configuration with 512GB of SSD storage and 16GB of DDR5 memory, while the Walmart ABS system lists 1TB of storage and 32GB of DDR5 for $849.
That comparison leaves out the usual living-room PC questions: size, noise, controller setup, software behavior and whether Windows 11 is what a buyer wants near a television. On hardware-per-dollar, though, the Walmart listing is unusually aggressive for a prebuilt desktop with a current Intel CPU, a discrete Arc GPU and enough memory to avoid the first obvious upgrade.
The deal is listed at Walmart. As with any retailer discount, price and availability can change without asking the PC hardware discourse for permission.
This story draws on original reporting from Tom's Hardware.
