While hunting for gaming PC deals in the Prime Day event this morning, I came across this monstrosity over at Walmart. At just under $580, you might be tempted to get this as a gift from someone who wants to get into PC gaming and let's be honest, it does look like a really cool machine. But looks are deceiving and this is one of the more egregious 'deals' I've seen so far.
First of all, the graphics card is an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Super. This GPU is now five years old and while that might not sound particularly ancient, it's far less capable than an RTX 4060 or even an RTX 3060. At the time, it was fine for 1080p gaming and it's probably okay now in lots of games, but you really shouldn't be buying a new one for this kind of money.
- We're curating all the best Prime Day PC gaming deals right here.
Making matters worse, though, is the CPU. Yes, you've read the specs right—it's an Intel Xeon, specifically one from 2012 that uses the old Ivy Bridge architecture. Sure it has four cores, eight threads, and a boost clock of 3.9 GHz but it's just woefully inadequate for today's games.
It has absolutely no right existing in any gaming PC deal these days but at least you don't need to search hard to find something far, far better.
Quick links
- Skytech Gaming Nebula | $699.99 @ Amazon (save $150)
- iBuyPower Tracemesh | $1,099.99 @ Amazon (save $250)
- CyberPowerPC Gamer Supreme | $1,699.99 @ Amazon (save $300)
Prime Day superior gaming PC deals
For just $120 more, you could buy the Skytech Gaming Nebula gaming PC. That has a Core i5 13400F, the best budget gaming CPU right now, and an RTX 4060 for brilliant 1080p performance. Yes, it's not sporting the latest DDR5 RAM but 16 GB of DDR4-3200 is much faster than the 16 GB of slow DDR3 in the Novatech rig.
Doubling the budget gets you the iBuyPower Tracemesh machine, with a 20-core, 28-thread Core i7 14700F processor and an RTX 4060 Ti. It's a little bit more expensive than other 4060 Ti PCs I've seen but they tend not to have as capable a CPU as this one and usually have DDR4, rather than DDR5, for the system RAM.
And while it's pretty unfair to compare a $580 gaming PC to one with a $1,700 price tag, the CyberPowerPC machine is a fantastic deal. It boasts the best gaming CPU you can buy at the moment, an RTX 4070 Ti Super (clunky name but great performance), lots of DDR5 RAM, and liquid cooling.
It's three times more expensive than the Novatech 'deal' but it's considerably more than three times faster. It'll handle 1440p and 4K gaming with ease, and you'll be able to enable DLSS performance enhancers for extra fps, in games that support it. This is true of any of the three gaming PC deals I've found but not so for the GTX 1660 Super.
That GPU can only use AMD's FSR 3.1 system, which is almost as good as Nvidia's DLSS but not quite on par in some games. When the AI giant designed that graphics chip, it used the RTX 20-series Turing architecture as the baseline but removed all of the Tensor and ray tracing cores.
It made the GPU much cheaper but these days it also means it just doesn't have the feature set of the RTX models.
Events like Prime Day are great for picking up solid deals, like those above, or saving big chunks of money on hardware that's one or two generations old. However, that Novatech PC is a classic example of a vendor trying its best to clear old stock and it's the kind of thing you really need to avoid in the sales, no matter how cheap it might seem.
That's why we're hunting out the best PC gaming deals, on desktops and laptops, monitors and components, to make sure that only the good stuff comes your way. Not 'gaming PCs' with processors so old they were being used by dinosaurs.
