Black Friday gaming PCs are going to be one of the big sellers over the sales this year, for the simple reason that this is the cheapest they're going to be for the foreseeable future. The price of RAM is massively spiking at the moment, and that's going to take GPU and SSD pricing with it eventually.
At the moment, however, the systems in stock at the major retailers and system builders have all been created with a stock of components purchases before the price rises, and so that hasn't been passed onto its customers. But it will be coming.
Here are our favorite gaming PCs sporting each of Nvidia's latest generation of graphics cards...
The cheapest RTX 50-series graphics card is now with us, and it's giving gamers a genuine option around $800. To be clear, this is a GPU with fewer cores than the RTX 4060, but the benefit is you get to use Multi Frame Gen. Latency will be poor if you start at a low frame rate—so don't get trying to max out your settings in most modern titles—but if you start off with your frame rate above, say, 60, you should be on solid ground. For a cheap cost, this is a decent entry into PC gaming, just don't expect the world. It also has a lovely fish tank chassis, which is nice to see in this price bracket.
This gaming PC lets you enter the current GPU generation for well under $1,000, and you're getting a pretty nice all-round package for this budget price. Sure, you're only getting DDR4 RAM and 1 TB of storage, but these things are common at the sub-$1,000 price point. DDR4 should serve you fine with this budget build, and storage can be upgraded easily. It's a great way to get started PC gaming with a friendly price tag.
I wouldn't recommend this to anyone looking for a build with all-round longevity, but if you're looking to get into PC gaming on a budget, this build is a good shout. That's because while it might have an old—but still serviceable—CPU and memory, it has an RTX 5060 Ti. In GPU-bound games, this rig should be great for 1080p and even some 1440p gaming.
This RTX 5060 Ti has the full 16 GB of VRAM, which is becoming ever-more important for gaming, especially at higher resolutions. The Core i5 14400F makes for a good pairing with it, as long as you're not playing very CPU-intensive games. It only comes with 16 GB of memory, but at least the platform is DDR5, so upgrading should be no issue—well, other than having to fork over more than you might expect thanks to the memory shortage.deakl
This RTX 5070 gaming PC also happens to come with the previous generation's best CPU for gaming. It's still no slouch, and is a better choice than non-X3D chips even today. The CPU-GPU combo here should have you handling most games just fine at 1440p, especially if you enable FG or MFG.deal
This is around the price range of most good RTX 5070 Ti deals right now, but the difference here is you're getting a very nice (albeit previous-gen) CPU here with the Core i7 14700F. That 8x P-Core processor should be more than enough for the mid-range champ, the RTX 5070 Ti, and you're even getting 2 TB of storage.
This is about as cheap as decent RTX 5080 builds are going for right now, and while you might get one with a better processor and more storage elsewhere, here you're getting that Alienware stamp. It's up to you if you think that's worth it. The Core Ultra 9 285 is no slouch, either, to be clear: it's a 24-core powerhouse, it's just not quite an X3D chip. Still, you can't have it all.
Yes, it's an expensive gaming PC, but you'll struggle to find an RTX 5090 gaming rig for much less than this, let alone with the same CPU, RAM, and SSD configuration—especially that X3D chip. Big on price, massive on gaming performance.
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.
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.
