Here's an RTX 3080 gaming PC on sale for what that GPU cost on its own last year
For $1,600 you can score an Asus ROG gaming PC with an RTX 3080 at its core.
Memorial Day is upon us, and that means Memorial Day PC gaming deals are out in full force. This gaming PC deal has been going strong over the weekend, but there's still a chance to grab it if you're in the market for a gaming PC. We recommend you check it out, at least. This is an RTX 3080 gaming PC deal for the price of that high-end graphics card on its own last year.
It's an Asus ROG branded gaming PC with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 10GB and Intel Core i7 11700KF for $1,600 at Best Buy. Yeah, basically the price you'd have been forced to pay if you'd have wanted to buy an RTX 3080 on its own only six months ago. This is the sort of price we'd love to see RTX 3080 PCs start at, but sadly that's still not the case even thought GPUs are much easier to come by today.
This is roughly the price we're seeing some RTX 3070 gaming PCs go for today. While we don't recommend those PCs at that price, it just goes to show how good of a deal this RTX 3080-powered PC is.
The GPU is the star of the show, with 8,704 CUDA Cores and 10GB of GDDR6X memory. Alongside that, Intel's Core i7 11700KF is a speedy eight-core, 16-thread processor able to keep up with high frame rates and offer snappy productivity performance. Would've been nice to see Intel's 12th Gen make its way into this machine, but this is more than enough for our gaming needs.
Asus ROG Gaming Desktop | Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 | Intel Core i7 11700KF | 16GB RAM | 512GB SSD | 2TB HDD | $2,099.99 $1,599.99 at Best Buy (save $500)
Wow, this is deal worth shouting about. An RTX 3080 would've easily set you back this much money alone just a few months back, and now you're getting the rest of the PC thrown in with it. Granted, an RTX 3080 10GB shouldn't cost anywhere near $1,000 or more, but that's today's GPU economy. The rest of this PC is admirable, anyways. The CPU is last-gen, but quick, and while the RAM and SSD storage are a bit on the slim side, they're a great starting off point for further upgrades.
There's 16GB of DDR4 RAM in this machine, and while it's not specified whether that's single- or dual-channel, my fingers are crossed for the latter. I would suspect that's the case here, too.
The SSD is on the small side at 512GB. It will fit your OS and a couple games on it at least—depending on your choice of game (maybe only one CoD). At least there's 2TB of HDD to expand on that, although an HDD will be much slower when it comes to loading times. This is probably where you'd want to upgrade this PC later in life. Either that or the CPU cooler.
The exact CPU cooler isn't specified, but I'm assuming it's a stock Intel number. You may want to replace that with a more proficient cooler at some point if that is the case, but these can be found for cheap.
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Jacob earned his first byline writing for his own tech blog. From there, he graduated to professionally breaking things as hardware writer at PCGamesN, and would go on to run the team as hardware editor. He joined PC Gamer's top staff as senior hardware editor before becoming managing editor of the hardware team, and you'll now find him reporting on the latest developments in the technology and gaming industries and testing the newest PC components.