Over the last couple of years, when the deals are flowing, some prebuilt gaming PCs have started to become better value than buying the parts for an equivalent rig yourself. I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed that so keenly as this year, though, as over the last few weeks, during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, I’ve seen gaming PCs that are far and away cheaper than their respective components.
That’s in no small part thanks to the current memory shortage, which has seen the prices for RAM kits skyrocket as stocks run short. Though other components aren’t cheap to begin with, of course. Graphics cards, in particular, even when a little below MSRP, are still incredibly expensive products this generation.
Some of the best deals on prebuilt gaming PCs this Cyber Monday, though, have been surprisingly well-priced. So well-priced, in fact, that it didn’t take me long to figure out that some of them are cheaper than you’d spend on the parts individually—a fact that would have shocked me a few years ago, as it’s the opposite of how the PC gaming market has traditionally been. Here are just three prebuilts with great discounts proving this point.
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Let’s work this out, then. Even looking at some of the cheapest components on sale right now, we’re looking at $350 for an RTX 5060 Ti, $180 for the Core i5 14400F, $100 for a B760M motherboard that supports DDR5, $80 for an 80 PLUS Gold 650 W PSU, and that already brings us to $710.
Now, let’s throw in the memory. Even just a cursory glance at Amazon shows we’re looking at over $250 just for a 32 GB DDR5-5200 kit with decent CAS latency timings. And for a DDR5-6000 kit, most likely another $50 on top. That already puts us at $1,000, and now factor in that we still have yet to buy a case, storage, and cooling. And then spend time building it and crossing our fingers that it powers on.
It’s a shame, because PC building is fun and it’s a useful skill to know, but PCs like this Stormcraft Sirius for $1,000 at Newegg really is significantly cheaper than building an equivalent one yourself, even with component sales. Unless you get lucky spotting some stellar flash sales on components, of course.
Now we’re on to some real meat and potatoes, here. I wasn’t sure whether we were going to see an RTX 5080 gaming PC for under $2,000 this Cyber Monday. But Alienware only went and did it, because this RTX 5080 Aurora is just $1,900 direct from Dell.
An RTX 5080 will set you back about $1,000 right now. A Core Ultra 7 265F will set you back about $328, and then, as mentioned above, a 32 GB kit will set you back about $250. That puts us at $1,578, if we’re lucky, giving us just $300 to work with for 2 TB of storage, a big power supply, a motherboard, cooling, and a case. You’d have to get very lucky to snap up deals on the rest of those products for so cheap. And by ‘very lucky’ I mean ‘miraculously lucky.’
So, not only at the budget and midrange end of the scale with the RTX 5060 Ti build, but also at the high end of it with this RTX 5080 one, we see it’s cheaper right now to buy a prebuilt.
This one’s probably the easiest to figure out, because we almost don’t need to check everything after the graphics card and CPU. The cheapest you’ll get an RTX 5090 for right now is about, er, $2,800. A Ryzen 7 7800X3D will set you back about $374, and a fast 32 GB DDR5 kit will set you back about $300.
We’re already at $3,474, giving us just over $200 left to buy, well, absolutely everything else: case, storage, cooling, power supply, and motherboard. And bear in mind you’re not going to want to cheap out on these things for a monster X3D and RTX 5090 build. It’s just not possible to build a PC as good as this one for as cheap as its current sale price. Not right now, anyway, while GPU and memory prices are so high.
So there we have it. Perhaps somewhat sadly for us who like to build our PCs, prebuilts seem to be where it’s at right now, whatever your budget.
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