Holy hardware, an Asus RTX 3060 gaming PC for $740
Asus is a big fan of dropping stupid good discounts ahead of Black Friday.
Asus ROG Strix G10 | Nvidia RTX 3060 | Core i5 11400F | 16GB RAM | 512GB SSD | $1,129.99 $739.99 at Amazon (save $390)
Granted you don't get a massive amount of storage space with this one, but at least you get a great CPU/GPU combo for the price. 16GB of RAM should be more than enough for gaming, and with a discount like that you can afford a little upgrade later down the line.
Just in time for Black Friday, Asus has shot onto our radar with the ROG Strix G10 and it's really setting a standard for pricing on RTX 3060-powered gaming PCs this year. It hasn't been this cheap before, either, except for a few days a lightning deal.
Right now, the Asus ROG Strix G10 is $740 down from $1,130, which beats out everything we've seen so far on the lead up to Black Friday on November 25.
We set up this crib sheet so you can get a bead on just the kind of price you should expect to pay (or at least a soft cap, depending on the rest of the config.) This machine sits well below the $800 bar we've set for PCs touting Nvidia's RTX 3060 graphics card. And sure, it may not be packing the latest and greatest CPU, but Intel's Core i5 11400F was a stalwart contender on release (only last year), and we count it as still very relevant today.
For this price, we expected at least to be stuck with a spinning platter HDD, but no. Asus has even granted us a PCIe SSD for that price. Alright, its a little on the small side at 512GB, and it's only PCIe 3.0, but at least there's potential to upgrade with another M.2 slot if you need more space. Take a look at our Black Friday SSD deals if that's what you're in need of.
And honestly, you don't need more RAM than what's there. There's no word on the specs page as to the speed of the RAM, but if it ends up being terrible, you've at least got time (and spare dollar) to pick up some more over Black Friday.
A $390 discount really isn't bad for something like this, and I have to say I am a bit of a ROG fangirl so I'll personally vouch for the quality here. Let's just hope Asus takes the same care with its PCs as it does with its laptops.
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Screw sports, Katie would rather watch Intel, AMD and Nvidia go at it. Having been obsessed with computers and graphics for three long decades, she took Game Art and Design up to Masters level at uni, and has been rambling about games, tech and science—rather sarcastically—for four years since. She can be found admiring technological advancements, scrambling for scintillating Raspberry Pi projects, preaching cybersecurity awareness, sighing over semiconductors, and gawping at the latest GPU upgrades. Right now she's waiting patiently for her chance to upload her consciousness into the cloud.