I thought the Katana X10 gaming PC was looking like a good deal last week, but now Newegg has cut the price of this RTX 3060 Ti rig down to under $950 it's looking even better.
It is, admittedly, last-gen in terms of the raw hardware across the board, but it's a machine that will deliver excellent 1440p gaming frame rates for less than the price of some RTX 3050-based systems. And seriously, screw that card.
The most important thing for any PC gamer is the performance of that RTX 3060 Ti graphics card. This was one of the best cards to come out of the entire Ampere range—it's not a slightly faster RTX 3060, it uses an entirely different GPU. The GA104 is the same chip the RTX 3070 sports, but with a few shaders chopped out to create this more affordable, but still impressive graphics card.
You're able to throw the graphics preset sliders all the way to the top and still enjoy well over 60 fps at 1440p in pretty much any modern game. That does, however, exclude specific ray tracing effects, because they can even tax a high-end card. But, it being Nvidia, you do still get the benefit of DLSS, and that can even give you some decent 4K gaming chops, too.
The CPU component is a few generations old now, and the Core i5 11400F is of Intel's old style of processor. That means it just uses performance cores and not the extra multi-threading power of its more recent 12th or 13th Gen chips. That said, it's still a six-core, 12-thread CPU that will boost to 4.4GHz.
And that's plenty for gaming and most casual productivity tasks as well.
The rest of the spec is equally solid, with 16GB of DDR4-3200 and a 500GB NVMe SSD as the boot drive. There's also a 650W 80 Plus Gold power supply, which should see you right at this level for a while if you do upgrade. It's also sporting Wi-Fi 5 support from the B560 motherboard if you can't get a LAN cable to reach.
In short, for under $1,000 I think this is an excellent spec and price for a new gaming PC. Especially at a time when it can be prohibitively expensive to get into PC gaming.
