Prime Day live blog: the best Big Deal Days PC gaming deals still around today
It's the second day of Amazon's Fall Prime Day event, but with every other retailer jumping on board the discounts aren't just going to die at midnight.
One of the best deals of the week has only gotten better today. We've seen Alienware's mighty 34-inch ultrawide OLED on sale before, but this is $100 cheaper than it was back around Prime Day in July, and $300 off the original list price.
We prefer the Samsung QD-OLED panel in the Alienware to the LG WOLEDs you might otherwise find; they're a touch brighter and that can make quite a difference when it comes to OLED gaming monitors. This one also has a glossy coating which makes the true black reproduction sing and HDR really pop.
I've got to talk about the fantastic Lenovo Legion Pro 7i, too. It's the best gaming laptop I've tested from this generation and, while it wasn't a bad price at launch compared to the competition, it's now a stonking deal. Technical term, that. The GPU is powerful, there's a ton of DDR5 memory, and the CPU is a serious bit of silicon, too.
And as a device it's great. It's not overly 'gamery' and feels like a grown up laptop. It even has a numpad on its admittedly excellent keyboard. Though you can, of course, go to town with the pre-key RGB illumination if you want...
This is the cheapest we've seen the RTX 4070 retailing for since launch. I mean, it always seemed like a sub-$500 GPU, and we're getting mighty close now. The only slight concern is that the RX 7800 XT can be picked up for $500 right now, and beats this Nvidia card in straight raster terms. Though the GeForce GPU absolutely hoses the AMD card when it comes to ray tracing, and DLSS and Frame Generation are still more impressive technologies, and only available to Nvidia cards.
You cannot have too much storage space, and with PC games taking up more and more room—to the point where even just the best games released this year won't fit on a 1TB drive—this bargain of a 4TB SSD couldn't have come at a better time. In his recent Lexar NM790 review Jacob discovered that it's as fast as the best PCIe 4 SSDs on the market, is cool and efficient, and is, well, massive.
If that's still a little rich for your blood, the 2TB version is just as quick (in fact a touch quicker in terms of writes) and is an absolute bargain at just $87. This time last year we were excited when a relatively slow 1TB SSD was that price. What a difference 12 months can make...
Who doesn't love a Secretlab gaming chair? Anyone who's not sat in one maybe. Whatever, they're our favorite places to park our posteriors while gaming and for once they're cheaper on Amazon than they are if you were to go direct to Secretlab itself.
At just $60 this is one of the cheapest of the Big Deal Days offers I've found. Well, that I'd actually spend our own money on, anyways. It's not a lot of cash for a fairly healthy chunk of really rather fast storage. If you're looking for a little extra space in your PC or laptop, this excellent WD Black SSD is a winner.
Not content with just having the outright best gaming laptop on offer over this sales event, Lenovo also has my favorite budget gaming laptop heavily discounted, too. This Legion Slim is less than $1,000 but comes with an excellent spec, sporting an RTX 4060 GPU, a strong AMD Zen 4 CPU, and a good chunk of DDR5 memory.
For a budget machine it's also got a great screen as well, sporting a 1920 x 1200 resolution and a 144Hz refresh rate.
I have to admit I'm pretty taken by this Yeyian gaming PC, here. Like in laptops, which are effectively using the exact same GPU silicon, RTX 4060 machines really ought to be less than $1,000, especially during a sales event like this Fall Prime Day. This yummy Yumi gaming PC manages to get well below that threshold and is still able to offer a full 1TB SSD and 16GB of memory.
You are stuck on a last-gen CPU, but the 12400F is still a great budget chip that isn't going to look out of touch for a good while yet. If you were looking to do more content creation, etc. then maybe you'd prefer the option to have DDR5 memory and more of an upgrade path, but this is still a great budget gaming rig that will deliver straight out of the box.
Not that long ago a 27-inch 1440p 170Hz gaming monitor would have been going for at least $400, more so for an IPS display. But this is 2023, the land of milk and honey, where tech is cheap and... I can't even pretend. Still, at a time when so many things are painfully expensive, seeing a proper high-refresh rate gaming monitor for under $200 is certainly pleasing.
If I was on the lookout for a genuine desktop replacement gaming laptop, but couldn't stretch to something like the $2,100 Lenovo Legion Pro 7i, then this Asus machine would be my next port of call. The RTX 4070 is a decent mobile GPU, and will happily pair with that 17.3-inch 1080p panel. You get 1TB of speedy storage, 16GB of DDR5 memory, and one of the tastiest of AMD's latest Zen 4 mobile CPUs.
The Ryzen 9 7940HS is an eight-core, 16-thread chip that will boost up to 5.2GHz if you let it. It also comes rocking the same 780M iGPU that the best gaming handhelds come rocking. So, while you'll need to be plugged into a wall socket to get the most out of the RTX 4070, you could switch purely to the integrated GPU, turning off the Nvidia card entirely, and still get some decent 1080p gaming performance and some decent gaming battery life, too.
Our Jeremy has been using this ultrawide gaming monitor as his main screen in the office probably for the past year, and it's now a $305 display. It wasn't super expensive even at launch, but now it's hands-down the cheapest proper ultrawide gaming monitor that we would actually recommend. It's got a suprisingly good VA panel, a 165Hz refresh rate, and now a great price.
Razer's BlackShark V2 is still one of my favorite gaming headsets. It sounds good, aping the original Cloud Alpha multi-chamber driver design, it's comfortable, and the wireless connection is pretty much flawless. It may have now been superseded by the 2023 version, but that is a minor improvement on things like battery life and the mic, but the audio and wireless remains the same. Which means really good.
The Quest 3 is the new benchmark by which all virtual reality headsets should be benched against now. It's more of everything compared with the Quest 2, but retains the ease of setup and use that makes it more valued than any $1,500 high-end set could possibly be.
But if you're still concerned about the $500 - $600 price point of the Quest 3, then the Quest 2 is still a great VR headset, and a really good PC VR headset, too. And it's back down to its $300 price point, but now with a 128GB capacity at its heart. It's a quality piece of kit and if you haven't played Half-Life: Alyx yet you are kinda missing out on what is essentially Half-Life 3, or as close as you're going to get.
It doesn't have to cost a fortune to update you PC gaming setup, and especially not around these little sales events, either. Our Jorge has been scouting out the best sub-$100 deals and you can go completely wire-free on your keyboard and mouse kit for a bargain price right now.
The Kiyo Pro is a seriously impressive 1080p webcam, and I would put it in front of the Elgato Facecam, too. Both are able to deliver uncompressed 1080p footage, but I've been far more impressed by the Razer's image quality. The Razer is the webcam I use at my desk in the PC Gamer office, but the Elgato ($120 today) is the one I use at home—and I certainly prefer the Kiyo Pro.
And I also love the little twist-shut privacy shield which physically closes the lens opening in a thoroughly pleasing manner. Nice action.
If a former colleague hadn't accidentally put these buds through a washing machine cycle there's a good chance I'd still be using them today. The JBL buds offer a great level of noise cancelling, impressive audio, and low-latency wireless dual-mode connections. And they're not far off half price right now.
As our Nick noted, seeing the RTX 4080 come down below the $1,000 mark has been a long time coming. It's tough to not feel like the card should have been at most $1,000 at launch, but as the prices come down the RTX 4080 is starting to look like a far more tempting big boi graphics card.
What's that? You can't buy a 50-inch 4K TV for less than $150? Hold my drink...
Did you buy either the 256GB or 64GB Steam Deck handheld? Starting to feel like you could actually do with a bit more storage for all those sweet, sweet indie games? Well Sabrent's Rocket 2230 is way better than even the 512GB SSD Valve ships the top-end Deck with, offering lower power operation and faster storage speeds. And the 512GB version is just under $60 today.
Or you can go the whole hog and drop a full 1TB 1TB SSD into your Deck for less than $90. Bargain.
You know we love Secretlab chairs, right? Well, even if they are still on sale right now, the Titan Evo is still around $500, and that's a lot of money to spend on something you're just going to sit your butt on. For half that you can pick up Corsair's latest, affordable gaming chair, the TC100 Relaxed. It's no bucket seat, because you don't need a bucket seat when you're not taking a corner in a Porsche, and it comes in a fetching fabric trim.
If all you want is a processor that will deliver the absolute fastest gaming performance then AMD has built the chip for you; the Ryzen 7 7800X3D. It's a stunner, and doesn't suffer from any of the potential Windows scheduling pitfalls the 32-thread, dual-CCX Ryzen 9 7950X3D does. And now it's a great price to build your new gaming PC around.
