Gaming PC deal: This surprisingly capable 1440p gaming PC is down to just $1,050

iBuyPower Slate Mono 230A gaming desktop on green background — (Image credit: iBuyPower, Microsoft)

Nvidia may get most of the love when it comes to graphics cards, but AMD's RDNA 2 architecture gets plenty right too. The Radeon RX 6600 XT you'll find inside this iBuyPower machine is capable of gaming at the top settings at 1440p. There's a decent AMD Ryzen 5 5600X CPU in there too, for an overall up-to-date machine that will handle today's games well. Not bad for just $1,050.

If you're looking for comparisons, the RX 6600 XT sits somewhere between the GeForce RTX 3060 and the 3060 Ti, making it an up-to-date graphics card that can handle pretty much anything you throw at it.

Well, almost anything. AMD's current ray tracing chops leave a lot to be desired, and the performance does tank phenomenally, especially at this end of AMD's line-up. Thankfully modern games look pretty great without physically perfect lighting.

That CPU is really impressive too, sitting at the top of our best CPU for gaming list for the longest time, right up until Intel released its Alder Lake chips in fact. Intel's finest shouldn't distract you from the fact that this is a great chip still, that will handle modern games and more serious applications with ease.

You get 16GB of DDR4-3000 for your money as well, along with a 480GB SSD and a 1TB spinning hard drive for your bigger games. A decent specification that focuses on what matters most and doesn't compromise unnecessarily to hit an unrealistic price point. It even comes with a keyboard and mouse.

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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.