There's never a shortage of entire gaming PCs on sale for Black Friday. In fact, even when there was a shortage of GPUs it was still possible to find a gaming PC ready to ship with relatively slim lead times for delivery. Those shortages are all over now, which means Black Friday gaming PC deals are popping up like mushrooms on a rainy day.
- We're curating all the best Black Friday PC gaming deals right here.
As there are so many gaming PC deals out there right now, we need to be extra attuned to what's actually good and what's not worth your money. It's all well and good that there's a $699.99 gaming PC on sale at Amazon, but when it comes with a GTX 1650 Super and 8GB of single-channel RAM, you can do a lot better.
So, let's be critical about the gaming PCs on offer today and look out for those gaming PCs that don't make enormous sacrifices for a palatable price tag.
What we want:
- Dual-channel memory
- RTX 3060/RX 6600 or better
- A current or last-gen CPU
- 512GB SSD storage
What we want to avoid:
- RTX 20-series or older GPU
- Single-channel memory
- 256GB SSD
- Ageing CPU architecture
Those requirements may seem steep but these are the sort of specs I feel will give you the best impression of PC gaming on a budget in 2022. There's no reason not to expect all of that under $1,000, either—I've already found a few. Most under $900, in fact.
Black Friday gaming PC deals under $1,000
Perhaps the most surprising thing for me in looking around for these worthwhile Black Friday gaming PC deals is how little there was on Amazon. I found a lot of machines asking for far too much money for old spec CPUs and either RTX 20-series or even GTX 16-series GPUs. That's just not on, and don't be fooled by these sorts of 'deals'.
It's a buyer's market for GPUs, whether some sellers want you to know that or not, and GPU shipments are reportedly historically down. You can and should score a decent RTX 30-series or RX 6000-series graphics card ahead of the more affordable next-generation GPUs from Nvidia and AMD, don't settle for less.
The same goes for CPUs. We've had back-to-back fantastic CPU generations with Intel's 12th and 13th Gen and AMD's Ryzen 5000-series and 7000-series—unless the deal is absolutely amazing, you should stick to these more modern chips.
