Best cheap Black Friday gaming PC right now

A cheap Black Friday gaming PC deal is one of the best ways to secure a GPU right now, and you can even get some pretty high performance rigs for your money—you just gotta know where to look. And although we'll always recommend getting into building your own as it's great fun, and will almost always save you some money in the long run, it's not always the more practical option. If you want to try the old-fashioned way, we have plenty of advice on building your own with our gaming PC build guides. But we also get that, well, it's not like you'll be able to buy a GPU for it anyway in this climate.

The build process does take time and patience. And with the right cheap gaming PC deal, you can avoid that barrier, and maybe even end up saving a bit of money over building your own. At the very least, it's a whole lot more convenient. And if you'd rather stay portable we've got the best cheap gaming laptop deals to keep you covered too.

• Looking for other PC gaming deals? Here's our roundup of the best Black Friday deals in 2021.

In this frequently updated hub, we look out for the best gaming PC deals online and separate them out into price categories. Budget gaming PCs between $500 and $1,000 should be able to play most modern games at 1080p and good graphical settings. The higher-end systems above $1,000 come with more powerful CPUs and graphics cards.

We also don't judge purely on price: the components in these PCs matter, and we consider how the parts compare to what you'd buy in a DIY rig. In most cases, these machines won't be the ones from our best gaming PCs list, but whatever you’re getting will be worth the price.

Cheap gaming PC deals

$500-1,000

HP Pavilion Gaming Desktop | Ryzen 3 5300G | RTX 3060 | $969.99 $869.99 at HP (save $100)
Set the graphics card to an RTX 3060 in the configuration screen, and you can get a 30-series gaming PC for  $869.99—saving $50 on the normal price. You'd ideally want to up the CPU to a Ryzen 5 5600G, RAM to 16GB, and SSD to a 512GB model too, but you'll soon find yourself way over $1,000 if you do. 

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HP Pavilion Gaming Desktop | AMD Ryzen 3 5300G | AMD RX 5500 4GB| 8GB RAM (dual-channel) | 256GB SSD |  $649.99 $549.99 at HP (save $100)
Another HP unit, here. This really is a budget PC, too, but with it comes the capability for 1080p gaming and the option to upgrade down the line. It's an all-AMD machine, too, and the 5300G and RX 5500 combo should prove decent if you're planning to get really into CS:GO or League of Legends at 1080p.

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$1000+

CyberPowerPC Gamer Xtreme | Core i5 11600KF | RTX 3060 | 16GB RAM | 1TB NVMe SSD | $1,469.99 $1,229.99 at B&H Photo (save $240)
This is a tasty deal on a gaming PC that will gobble up your games and spit out a smooth frame rate at 1080p. The RTX 3080 is core to this deal, although the six-core, 12-thread Core i5 11600KF is worth highlighting too. The rest of the spec is on point, with a healthy amount of RAM and storage, and it's all contained in a vibrant, blinged-out chassis. You even get a keyboard and mouse while saving $240 off the normal price.

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Alienware Aurora R12 | Intel Core i7 11700F | Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti | 16GB RAM | 512GB | $1,999.99 $1,371.99 at Dell (Save $628)
The RTX 3060 Ti is a little monster of a GPU that can even pump out frames at 4K, and coupled with a top-end 11th Gen Intel processor, you cant go wrong. This one comes with a good amount of RAM and enough speedy NVMe storage to see you through.

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Dell XPS Desktop Special Edition | Intel Core i7 11700 | Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti | 32GB | 1TB SSD (1TB NVMe + 1TB HDD) | $2,099.99 $1,469 at Dell (save $630)
It's not often you find an RTX 3060 Ti in a system these days, and that's a shame because it's one of our favourite graphics cards this generation. This PC is surprisingly a good deal, too. It has a great GPU, CPU, and comes with a generous 32GB of RAM and 1TB of speedy SSD storage, and a 1TB HDD as backup, too.

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Alienware Aurora Ryzen Edition R10 | AMD Ryzen 7 5800 | Nvidia RTX 3060  | 16GB DDR4  | 512GB SSD | $1,709.99 $1,322.99 at Dell (save $387)
Here we have the Ryzen edition Aurora R10, and while it isn't the absolute tip-top of gaming hardware, it's still a very capable machine. With an Nvidia RTX 3060 and Ryzen 7 5800 combo, you can expect to run plenty of games at the highest settings on a 1080p monitor quite happily.

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When you pay the premium to configure or purchase a prebuilt PC you are paying for more than just the parts. You are paying for warranty service, support and the peace of mind that your system was put together by professionals. These are some of the things we value highly when considering the best budget gaming PCs. We also look at other unique selling points like design, upgradability and anything you wouldn't be able to do when building it yourself.

The other benefit in 2021 is that prebuilt PCs are a better, or at least more reliable, way of finding a graphics card at a reasonable price. The ongoing silicon shortage and high demand makes finding discrete GPUs tough to find at anything close to their original prices, so prebuilts are somewhat invaluable today.

For most users that don't have the luxury to spend over $1000 on a prebuilt gaming PC, upgradability and performance per dollar are paramount. When we set out to choose our top choices for budget prebuilt gaming PCs, we took a look at almost every major manufacturer and system integrator to find the best combination of value, reliability, customer feedback, design and performance under $500 and under $1,000. 

We still highly recommend the experience of building it yourself, but if you can't do that then one of the systems above will have you gaming in short order.