Every year, many of us head out into the Black Friday sales to pick up a new part for our gaming rigs or sometimes a whole new setup. In the case of the latter, we all naturally want to get the best possible gaming PC for the money, and we've been hunting down all the best deals for you.
- We're curating the best deals this Black Friday on PC gaming products we love
Yes, I know that's a ridiculous question to ask, but let me explain the method behind the malarky. The standard benchmark has always been, and still is in many cases, 3DMark Time Spy, but that's getting on a bit in age, and the rendering behind the graphics isn't particularly representative of modern games.
That's where Steel Nomad and Speed Way come in, with the former sticking entirely to traditional 'rasterization' rendering and the latter using a heavy dose of ray tracing. I prefer the first test, so I searched through the 3DMark database, pulling up the average score for each Nvidia RTX 50-series desktop graphics card.
Then I took all the best RTX gaming PC deals we've found so far and calculated a rather silly 'Steel Nomads per buck' value for each one. And the PC that came out on top is this iBuyPower GeForce RTX 5070 rig, with a Ryzen 7 7800X3D processor.
GPU | Deal price for PC | Average Steel Nomad score | Steel Nomads per $ |
|---|---|---|---|
RTX 5070 | $1299 | 5296 | 4.077 |
RTX 5070 Ti | $1700 | 6872 | 4.042 |
RTX 5060 | $800 | 3167 | 3.959 |
RTX 508 | $2300 | 8800 | 3.826 |
RTX 5090 | $4000 | 14530 | 3.623 |
RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB | $1100 | 3605 | 3.277 |
RTX 5060 Ti 8 GB | $1090 | 3526 | 3.235 |
RTX 5050 | $770 | 2321 | 3.014 |
AMD's last-gen CPU is still a superb choice for gaming, but many folks have been put off by the RTX 5070. That's because it was hugely overpriced at launch, due to supply issues and Nvidia's choice of MSRP. Price cuts have mostly solved this issue, and we're now left with a very nice graphics card that you can pick up for $489 at Walmart.
Some of you might be disappointed by the speed of the gaming PC's RAM (DDR5-5200); it's not super-slow, and when DDR5 prices eventually come back down again, you could always swap it for snappier kit.
The same is true of the 1 TB SSD, though prices of those have yet to shoot up, so I'd grab a nice 2 TB secondary drive in the Black Friday sales and keep my Steam games on that.
Anyway, the point of all of this is that $1,300 of your hard-earned cash will net you a very good gaming PC. You can spend less, but it won't be as good; you can spend more, too, but as you go up in price, the performance gains become increasingly smaller per buck.
Mind you, the RTX 5070 Ti is only just behind on my Nomadometer, and that's a really good GPU. Is it worth spending a further $400 for one, though? Well, the Acer gaming PC at Best Buy, which has that particular graphics card, sports a Core i7 14700F processor, 32 GB of DDR5, and a 2 TB SSD.
So the CPU isn't as good for gaming as the iBuyPower's 7800X3D, but you're getting more storage and a better GPU. Four hundred bucks isn't exactly chump change, though, so I'll stick with my ludicrous rating method and my choice of the iBuyPower RTX 5070 gaming PC as being the best bang for the buck Nvidia rig.
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