Dave James

Dave James

Editor-in-Chief, Hardware

Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.

Latest articles by Dave James

MSI and Asus gaming monitors on a green background with the PC Gamer recommended logo in the top right
Best gaming monitors in 2026: the pixel-perfect panels I'd buy myself

By Dave James Last updated

Eye candy The best gaming monitors balance price with panel quality, resolution and refresh rate.

Eye candy
Nvidia RTX 5090 and XFX RX 9070 graphics cards
Best graphics cards in 2026: These are the GPUs worth spending money in right now

By Dave James Last updated

Pixel Pushers I've made a career out of prodding graphics cards and this has been the toughest set of recommendations I can remember.

Pixel Pushers
PC Gamer's Amazon Prime Day deals listing page image
October Prime Day PC gaming deals

By Dave James Last updated

Prime Day 2026 The Big Deal Days are coming next week, but there are already some tasty discounts around at Amazon and the other big retailers.

Prime Day 2026
ASRock and MSI graphics cards
Cheap graphics card deals this week

By Dave James Last updated

Deals We've done the hard yards sourcing the best graphics card deals for the GPUs worth putting in your gaming PC.

Deals
Zotac graphics card on a Prime Day background
October Prime Day graphics card deals

By Dave James Last updated

October Prime Day Every penny counts...

October Prime Day
PC hardware
The RAMpocalypse support group

By Dave James Last updated

Support Based on decades of team experience and expert knowledge we're here helping PC gamers navigate the pricing crisis.

Support
Lenovo Legion and Razer Blade 16 gaming laptops on a blue background.
Best gaming laptops 2026: We've reviewed the best gaming laptops of this generation and these are our favorites

By Dave James Last updated

Portable powerhouses From our own extensive testing, rigorously benchmarking 60+ machines over the past two years, these are the best gaming laptops you can buy today.

Portable powerhouses
A Minisforum Venus UM790 Pro and AtomMan G1 Pro mini PC on a custom PC Gamer Recommended background.
Best mini PCs in 2026: The best compact computers for gaming

By Al Bickham, Jacob Fox Last updated

Teeny Peecees Searching for a new super-compact gaming machine? Look no further.

Teeny Peecees
GameSir G7 Pro on an abstract blue background
October Prime Day controller deals

By Dave James Last updated

Prime Day 2026 The Big Deal Days are a-coming, and with them we're hoping for some cheap controllers.

Prime Day 2026
MSI Vector 16 gaming laptop on an abstract pink background
Best deals on gaming laptops

By Dave James Last updated

Deals Our regularly curated list of all the best gaming laptop deals you'll find today.

Deals
Asus ROG Strix Scope II 96 keyboard on a blue background
October Prime Day gaming keyboard deals

By Dave James Published

Prime Day 2026 Gaming keyboards are a pretty Big Deal (Days) around here.

Prime Day 2026
Logitech gaming mouse on a Prime Day background
October Prime Day gaming mouse deals

By Dave James Published

Prime Day 2026 These Big Deal Days could deliver some serious peripheral discounts.

Prime Day 2026
A series of gaming mice on a Prime Day banner with the PC Gamer logo.
I've not had to look far for some early Prime Day gaming mouse deals

By Dave James Last updated

Prime Day Here are the ones I recommend.

Prime Day
Razer Soma Chroma gaming chair
Razer Chroma Soma lighting

By Dave James Published

Gaming Chairs
A photo showing a size comparison of a Sony PlayStation 5 consoles against a variety of other gaming devices
Console rumour time #235

By Dave James Published

Hardware
A 2 TB server RAM kit
Who the hell is buying their server memory from Amazon?! Also, can I interest you in a $101,000 kit?

By Dave James Published

Deal? An X post just highlighted to me that Amazon really does sell everything.

Deal?
Photo mosaic made up of pages of PC Gamer magazine pages
I tried to make a jpg bigger than mathematically possible out of an entire year's worth of PC Gamer magazine pages

By Dave James Published

PC pics I used all the issues from 2004; can you tell what it is yet?

PC pics
Gigabyte RX 9070 GRE graphics card on an abstract background
Suddenly much cheaper and still much faster than an RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB, the RX 9070 GRE is the only sub-MSRP graphics card around today

By Dave James Last updated

Deal It's $500 today, but even at full price it would be cheaper than the top five tiers of Nvidia GPUs.

Deal
An MSI graphics card, an AMD CPU, and a Corsair PC case
Best gaming PC builds: Shop all our recommended system builds as we ride out the RAMpocalypse

By Andy Edser Last updated

DIY Pick the products from our latest recommendations.

DIY
Newgg bundle with CPU, motherboard, memory, and CPU cooler on an abstract background
PC building isn't dead: you can get the core of a quality gaming rig for $936 with these combo deals

By Dave James Published

Deal Newegg's combo deals will get you a CPU, cooler, motherboard, and memory for a decent price and Walmart's still got a solid Nvidia GPU deal.

Deal
Dave James, PC Gamer EIC for Hardware, wearing the Steam Frame while playing a game in VR.
Valve had next-gen VR 'headsets ready three, four years ago and they were big, bulky devices' but went back to the drawing board after actually putting them on

By Dave James Published

News The versatile Steam Frame's focus is "on being lightweight and being comfortable".

News
Nvidia RTX 5070 Founders Edition graphics card from various angles
New RTX 5070 variant could help bolster GPU supply but it surely won't help prices

By Dave James Published

News Nvidia is reportedly prepping a new version of the RTX 5070 potentially using failed RTX 5070 Ti or RTX 5080 cores.

News
Image from a video showing a ReShade addon running DLSS NR across multiple GPUs in Cyberpunk 2077
New DLSS 5 mod offloads Neural Rendering to a second card massively cutting the AI filter's performance hit

By Dave James Published

News DLSS Neural Rendering is being developed hard in the modding community.

15 Comments
News
Cyberpunk 2077 with DLSS 5 running on an AMD GPU.
Me: You can now run DLSS 5 on AMD GPUs. My RX 9070 XT: Please stop, it hurts us

By Dave James Published

News A new app allows you to inject DLSS Neural Rendering deep into games even if you're running an AMD card. You probably won't want to, though.

News
MSI RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB graphics card on an abstract pink background
Think fast: this RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB is $200 under the stupidly inflated price right now, but probably won't be for long

By Dave James Published

Deal Though, for pure gaming, I would still counsel you spend your money on an RX 9070 GRE instead. But I know you probably won't.

Deal
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