Pay less for sweet 1080p gaming with this $899 RTX 3060 PC deal

(Image credit: Future)

HP has its 4th of July sale running right now, and there are plenty of decent deals to be had on laptops, desktops, monitors, and peripherals if you fancy a bit of a hunt around. One machine that caught our eye more than any other is this subdued Pavilion gaming desktop that is surprisingly well spec'd for a machine that comes in at just $899.

Somewhat unusual for this generation of AMD CPUs, the Ryzen 7 5700G boasts integrated graphics, which gives you a backup mode if your graphics card ever fails, particularly as it is capable of some low-setting gaming. That aside though, you're getting an 8-core, 16-thread chip that has a max boost of 4.6GHz. It's no slouch, basically.

You get 16GB of DDR4-3200 RAM for your money, which is great for gaming today and tomorrow. The storage situation is pretty good for the money too, with a 512GB NVMe SSD as the main boot drive and a 1TB spinning hard drive providing plenty of space for your bigger games. Ideally, you'd want a single large SSD for everything, but that's an easy enough upgrade down the line.

The rest of the spec is pretty healthy too, with Wi-Fi 5 support, an ethernet port if you prefer your networking to be of the wired variety, and there's even a 3-in-1 card reader—if people still care about and use such things.

About the only thing that is obviously missing here is an abundance of multi-colored RGB lighting—something plenty of us can live without. Instead, you're looking at a sober chassis that focuses on what matters most, i.e. decent framerates at a decent price. That $400 saving certainly helps too.

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Alan has been writing about PC tech since before 3D graphics cards existed, and still vividly recalls having to fight with MS-DOS just to get games to load. He fondly remembers the killer combo of a Matrox Millenium and 3dfx Voodoo, and seeing Lara Croft in 3D for the first time. He's very glad hardware has advanced as much as it has though, and is particularly happy when putting the latest M.2 NVMe SSDs, AMD processors, and laptops through their paces. He has a long-lasting Magic: The Gathering obsession but limits this to MTG Arena these days.