HP has its 4th of July sale running right now, and there are plenty of decent deals to be had on laptops, desktops, monitors, and peripherals if you fancy a bit of a hunt around. One machine that caught our eye more than any other is this subdued Pavilion gaming desktop that is surprisingly well spec'd for a machine that comes in at just $899.
There are two components that matter most when it comes to gaming: the processor and the graphics card. Both of these are up-to-date here, with HP selecting the Ryzen 7 5700G for the brains of the operation and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 for the heavy lifting when it comes to gaming. This is a great card for 1080p gaming, that can also turn its hand to some 1440p action too.
Somewhat unusual for this generation of AMD CPUs, the Ryzen 7 5700G boasts integrated graphics, which gives you a backup mode if your graphics card ever fails, particularly as it is capable of some low-setting gaming. That aside though, you're getting an 8-core, 16-thread chip that has a max boost of 4.6GHz. It's no slouch, basically.
You get 16GB of DDR4-3200 RAM for your money, which is great for gaming today and tomorrow. The storage situation is pretty good for the money too, with a 512GB NVMe SSD as the main boot drive and a 1TB spinning hard drive providing plenty of space for your bigger games. Ideally, you'd want a single large SSD for everything, but that's an easy enough upgrade down the line.
The rest of the spec is pretty healthy too, with Wi-Fi 5 support, an ethernet port if you prefer your networking to be of the wired variety, and there's even a 3-in-1 card reader—if people still care about and use such things.
About the only thing that is obviously missing here is an abundance of multi-colored RGB lighting—something plenty of us can live without. Instead, you're looking at a sober chassis that focuses on what matters most, i.e. decent framerates at a decent price. That $400 saving certainly helps too.
