Best cheap gaming PC deals today

The best cheap gaming PC is all about finding the PC deal that suits both your wallet and your gaming needs. Whether you’re after an entry-level rig that can deal with a 1080p load or a high-spec machine capable of 4K gaming and beyond, you want to get as much tech for your cash as possible.

And that’s where we come in, trawling through the systems on offer this week, to give you the best idea as to where you should be spending your money. It’s not an easy task, either, because PC gaming has become a supremely expensive hobby in recent years. Unless you know where to look…

We’re splitting our rigs into three distinct categories: Entry-level, Sweet spot, and Luxury. In the middle, the $1,000 – $2,000 mark is where you’ll find the widest range of possible systems, and arguably is where the best gaming PC deals of today are likely to exist. But at both ends of the price spectrum it’s important to know you’re getting the best gaming hardware for you money.

We use all our combined decades of technological PC gaming expertise to determine whether something is a good deal or not, and you can rest assured that we’ll only recommend the best gaming PC deals right here. If something’s super cheap doesn’t automatically make it worth the money, and likewise just because a system’s $2,500 doesn’t mean it can’t be great value.

$500–$1,000

Ipason gaming desktop | AMD Ryzen 5 5600G | 16GB DDR4-3200 | 500GB NVMe SSD | $849.99 $509 at Newegg (save $340.99) (opens in new tab)
You can game on this machine to a certain extent—the integrated Vega GPU on the Ryzen chip will support 720p gaming at lower settings for sure. But we’re listing it here as a good base from which to add your own graphics card (opens in new tab) for a quick, powerful new gaming PC. The AMD CPU is a good six-core, 12-thread job, and the 16GB RAM will run everything you need. The 500GB SSD could be bigger, but that’s an easy, cheap upgrade down the line.

HP Pavilion | Ryzen 3 5300G | AMD RX 5500 | 8GB RAM | 512GB SSD | $555 at Amazon (opens in new tab)
Affordable gaming PCs are tough to find, and sometimes it is necessary to go back to older generations of hardware to hit a tight budget. But the eight-thread Ryzen chip still has something to offer, and the RX 5500 OEM GPU will deliver 1080p gaming performance around the same level as the current RX 6500 XT. For the money it will be a decent baseline to start from.

CLX SET gaming desktop | AMD Ryzen 7 5700G | 16GB RAM | 1TB SSD | $769.99 $699.99 at Best Buy (save $70) (opens in new tab)
Okay, hear me out here. This isn’t the best PC to buy as it’s sold. But, if you were to pick up this machine, which has a pretty good eight-core CPU, plenty of RAM, and lots of storage, you could buy a graphics card separately and fit it into this machine yourself. My vote would be the AMD Radeon RX 6700 10GB, which you can pick up on Best Buy for $329.99 (opens in new tab). Combine that with this machine and you’ve got a really great mid-range gaming PC for $1,020.

Forge Gladiator | Core i3 10105F | AMD RX 6600 | 16GB RAM | 1TB SSD | $799 at Amazon (opens in new tab)
The CPU is certainly where the bulk of money is being saved here, but pair that Core i310105F with the RX 6600 and you’ll still have a fairly decent gaming PC. With a terabyte of storage, you can fit thousands of smaller/older games on here, and it will have a good punt at modern games too on mid–low graphics settings.

Lenovo Legion Tower 5 | Ryzen 7 5800 | RTX 3060 12GB | 16GB RAM | 256GB NVMe + 1TB HDD | $1,399.99 $899.99 at Best Buy (save $500) (opens in new tab)
Not a terrible combo for the price here. I’m not the biggest fan of the SSD pairing but, as long as you don’t mind having only a few modern games saved to your main NVMe SSD and are happy using the HDD for deep storage, this isn’t a bad price for the rest of the spec.

Skytech Shiva II | Core i5 12400F | Nvidia RTX 3060 12GB | 16GB RAM | 500GB PCIe SSD | $999.99 at Amazon (opens in new tab)
The 12-thread Intel Core i5 is still one of the best gaming CPUs around, and with the back up of a 500GB NVMe SSD and 16GB RAM the Skytech rig is a decent rig when specced out with the RTX 3060 card. The $1,000 price tag is probably the limit of what you’d want to pay for this config, though, and Nvidia is the more expensive of the three GPU makers at this sort of performance level.

$1,000–$2,000

Yeyian Katana X10 | Core i5 11400F | Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti | 16GB RAM | 500GB SSD | $1,399 $1,096.99 at Newegg (save $302.01) (opens in new tab)
This is a great deal for a mid-tier gaming PC, especially when a lot of rigs around this price are delivering you an RTX 3060. The Core i5 is still a real solid CPU today, and that RTX 3060 Ti is probably the best mainstream GPU of Nvidia’s last generation of cards. You also get a full 16GB RAM and a 500GB NVMe SSD… which you’ll probably want to give a little more storage too down the line.

Alienware Aurora R13 | Core i7 12400F | Nvidia RTX 3060 | 16GB RAM | 512GB SSD | $1,919.99 $1,099.99 at Newegg (save $820) (opens in new tab)
It’s a little more than we’d hope to pay now that the RTX 40-series low-end graphics cards are out, but it’s not bad for Alienware. Pair that Core i7 12700F with the RTX 3060 and you’ve got yourself a decent last-gen machine that shouldn’t have trouble gaming or rendering at 1080p. You might want to nab a larger NVMe drive, however.

Skytech Chronos Gaming PC | Intel Core i7 12700F | Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti | 1TB SSD | 16GB RAM | $1,999.99 $1,799.99 at Newegg (save $200) (opens in new tab)
Here’s a deal on an actual RTX 40-series-powered PC. And they said it couldn’t be done. This PC comes with Nvidia’s RTX 4070 Ti, which is a mighty 4K beast powered by the Ada Lovelace architecture. It’s ultimately a pricey card, deal or no deal, and that’s reflected in the price tag before you today, but for the performance we can just about make peace with $1,800.

MSI Gaming PC | Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti | Intel Core i7 12700KF | 2TB SSD | 16GB RAM | $1,999 $1,899 at Newegg (save $100) (opens in new tab)
This is practically the same spec as the Skytech RTX 4070 Ti gaming machine, but has a 2TB SSD for that extra $100 MSI is asking. We’d go with the cheaper rig first, but if that goes out of stock, this is a great next-gen system that will deliver outstanding gaming performance.

$2,000+

Cyberpower PC Gamer Supreme | Core i7 13700KF | Nvidia RTX 4080 | 16GB DDR5 RAM | 2TB HDD + 1TB PCIe SSD | $2,770.10 at Newegg (opens in new tab)
A 13th Gen champ here with Nvidia’s latest GPU offering, too. It’s pricey, but considering it comes with not only a sweet GPU, it also has DDR5 RAM, and heaps of storage. Shame there’s a HDD but I suppose you can’t have everything.

Skytech Chronos | Core i7 12700F | Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti | 16GB DDR4 RAM | 1TB PCIe SSD | $1,999.99 $1,799.99 at Newegg (save $200) (opens in new tab)
Going last-gen with the CPU here has given Skytech some space to offer great savings on an RTX 4070 Ti gaming PC. It’s still a great spec, especially when you consider there’s a nice chunk of storage, too.

ABS Eurus Aqua | Core i7 13700KF | Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti | 16GB DDR4 RAM | 1TB PCIe SSD | $2,199.99 $1,999.99 at Newegg (save $200) (opens in new tab)
Just in case you’re considering pilfering the graphics card for resale, know that the 13700KF doesn’t come with integrated graphics. That said, anyone wanting to actually use this PC for good will be best pleased with the current-gen GPU/CPU combo. Dual channel DDR5 RAM and a 1TB NVMe SSD on top of that makes for one high-end beastie.

UK gaming PC deals

Weekly Sales II | Nvidia RTX 3060 | Intel Core i5 10400F | Nvidia RTX 3060 | 16GB RAM | 1TB SSD | £884.40 at Cyberpower PC (opens in new tab)
This machine won’t stick around for too long, but we do like all the constituent parts that go into this build. It’s a bit pricier for an RTX 3060 than we see US equivalents going for, but looking around we didn’t see anything with a sufficient spec for cheaper.

Ultra 55 | Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti | AMD Ryzen 5 5500 | 16GB RAM | 1TB SSD | £1,249 £1,050 at Cyberpower PC (save £199) (opens in new tab)
Combine MSI’s RTX 3060 Ti with the Ryzen 5 5500 and while you may struggle at 4K, you can bet this is a great config for gaming at 1440p. It comes with a 1TB Solidigm P41 Plus NVMe SSD, too, so lots of storage to play around with, though it’s not the speediest. 16GB of DDR4 RAM never goes amiss either.

Alphasync Diamond V2 | RTX 3060 Ti | Ryzen 7 5800X | 16GB RAM | 500GB SSD + 1TB SSD | £1,250.00 £1,049.99 at Ebuyer (save £200.01) (opens in new tab)
Not a terrible config here for the price. The Ryzen 7 5800X is still damn relevant, and with the RTX 3060 Ti this machine will even give 1440p a good punt. Along with next day delivery, you also get the benefit of a three year labour warranty, including a year for parts.

3XS SP4070TIR5 | RTX 4070 Ti | Ryzen 5 5600 | 16GB RAM | 1TB SSD | £1,599.98 at Scan (opens in new tab)
Stretching your budget a little can get you a PC with a current-gen graphics card, and while you’ll have to compromise a little with an older CPU and DDR4 RAM, this is still a great high-end machine for the price. That’s a 1TB Samsung 980 in there, too, which is still one of our favourite SSDs for gaming.

Graphics card hierarchy

The most important component for any gaming PC build is always going to be the graphics card. That will give you the best idea about how one machine matches up with another just in terms of raw gaming performance.

Below, we’ve listed the slew of GPUs we’ve had over the past couple of years listed in terms of their Time Spy Extreme index score as a way to put them in some sort of consistent hierarchy.

Click the button in the top right to enhance!

Graphics card hierarchy

(Image credit: Future)

Mục Lục

Should I build my own gaming PC or buy a prebuilt?

One of the biggest advantages to putting together your own budget gaming PC build (opens in new tab) is the ability to essentially choose every single component in the system. This allows you to take your time shopping around for deals and finding the perfect combination of parts to fit your budget and performance needs. The downside for most inexperienced builders is that this whole process can take some time and has the potential to cause quite a headache if something goes wrong. This is where prebuilt gaming PCs really shine.

When you pay the premium to configure or purchase a prebuilt PC you are paying for more than just the parts. You are paying for warranty service, support and the peace of mind that your system was put together by professionals. These are some of the things we value highly when considering the best budget gaming PCs. We also look at other unique selling points like design, upgradability and anything you wouldn’t be able to do when building it yourself.

Now that graphics cards are regularly available and the silicon shortage is starting to clear up, building your own PC is much easier than it was before. That said, a prebuilt rig is still a reliable way to get the exact graphics card you want.

For most users that don’t have the luxury to spend over $1000 on a prebuilt gaming PC, upgradability and performance per dollar are paramount. When we set out to choose our top choices for budget prebuilt gaming PCs, we took a look at almost every major manufacturer and system integrator to find the best combination of value, reliability, customer feedback, design and performance under $500 and under $1,000.

We still highly recommend the experience of building it yourself, but if you can’t do that then one of the systems above will have you gaming in short order.

What is a decent price for a gaming PC

The $1,000 – $1,500 mark is probably around the sweet spot for a new gaming PC. That will get you a graphics card that can nail 1440p at solid frame rates as well as a really good supporting spec. That should mean a relatively sizeable NVMe SSD, around 500GB, as well as 16GB of speedy memory, and a modern CPU.

Is PC gaming better than console?

Unquestionably. In real terms, it’s more expensive in terms of hardware, but there is a games library stretching back decades that no other gaming platform can possibly match. Games are also regularly cheaper, or free, on PC, too.

The PC is also more capable of doing more things than a games console, too. Try browsing the web on your PlayStation and you’ll know what we mean. It can also be portable, in either laptop or Steam Deck style.

What PC is equivalent to a PS5?

We would suggest that the AMD RX 6700 GPU will deliver around the same level of raw graphics performance as Sony’s PS5. That’s an OEM part, so you’ll only find it in a prebuilt gaming PC, but it’s a 11.3 TFLOP GPU versus the 10.3 TFLOP of the PS5.

Those numbers aren’t wholly comparative, however, but you would also need an 8-core CPU, 16GB of memory (though the PS5’s is spread between GPU and system), and a 500GB+ SSD.