How to buy smart this Black Friday

It's beginning to look a lot like Black Friday | Here's how to make sure you don't overpay on a Black Friday gaming laptop deal this year | How to spot the best Black Friday gaming PC deals Created for ignoble.experiment@arconati.us |  Web Version November 19, 2023 CONNECT WITH PC GAMER       SIGN UP ⋅   SHARE First up It's beginning to look a lot like Black Friday (Future) We're a week away from Black Friday itself, but that hasn't stopped every retailer around the world pushing out a host of great deals and, well, not so great deals already. And this is the perennial problem with any of these sorts of sales periods: picking out what's actually worth spending your money on and what isn't. We make it our mission to make sure we can filter out the dross and only serve up products and discounts that we'd recommend to our friends and family. As such, we've created some guides around key products, and things to look out for, as well as highlighting the top ten deals we've found this week. The Big Story (Razer) Here's how to make sure you don't overpay on a Black Friday gaming laptop deal this year Finding a good Black Friday gaming laptop deal isn't as clear cut and straightforward as it should be. The portable gaming market constantly changes in prices and specs, and retailers have a tendency to artificially inflate the price of something they want to get rid of every now and then. So it's difficult to know how much is too much for a gaming laptop. Well, fear not, as here's the perfect crib sheet for you to use, with rough prices that I think you should expect to pay for a gaming laptop over the deals season. Don't be fooled How to spot the best Black Friday gaming PC deals The annual Black Friday gaming PC deal bonanza looms ever closer but finding an offer that's actually worth your time and money is always going to be difficult. If you're looking to avoid buyer's remorse in an ever-changing market, you've come to the right place. Read the full story. How to choose the best Black Friday SSD deal for you Black Friday officially starts on November 24, though many online retailers have already kicked off their holiday sales, and you'll be sure to see lots of great PCs and components with big discounts. When it comes to solid state drives (SSDs), the good news is that you can get some fantastic ones for very little money, especially compared to what was on offer just a few years ago. Read the full story. How to pick the best Black Friday gaming monitor deals Black Friday officially starts on November 24 and for many of us that means a chance to grab a nice monitor upgrade. There will be a huge array of various models on offer but not all of them will be worth your attention. So to help you sift through everything and spot the real deals from the real duds, here are some of my tips and hints on choosing the right gaming monitor during this season of sales. Read the full story. These are the only last-gen graphics cards I think are worth hunting down in the Black Friday graphics card sales If the current prices of the latest AMD and Nvidia graphics cards aren't to your liking, then it's definitely worth considering a Radeon RX 6000-series or GeForce RTX 30-series card in the Black Friday graphics card sales. But a fair number of them just aren't special enough to warrant a look, so here are the ones that I would personally get, as long as they're under a very specific price. Read the full story. Here's what you need to know about Newegg and Best Buy's Black Friday price promises Black Friday and Cyber Monday are still a few weeks away, but that hasn't stopped some of the biggest online retailers already going into full holiday shopping mode. You may have spotted a great deal already, but what happens if the same item comes up even cheaper during the actual events? Well, here's what you need to know. Read the full story. Pretty big deals 1. CyberPowerPC | Ryzen 7 5700 | Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti | 16GB DDR4-3200 | 2TB SSD | $899.99 at Best Buy (save $275) (CyberPower) This is hands-down the cheapest RTX 4060 Ti toting gaming PC—and I think I can say this without undue hyperbole—we've ever seen. We were impressed when the Yeyian machine tipped up below the $1,000 mark, but this has a way better spec and is $100 cheaper. The Ryzen 7 5700 may be last-gen now, but it's an eight-core, 16-thread chip with enough processing grunt to keep the Nvidia GPU fed. For a budget machine, the 16GB DDR4 is decent, but that 2TB SSD is outstanding. With game sizes getting so chonk these days, 2TB is a great catch. 2. Lenovo Legion Pro 7i | Nvidia RTX 4080 | Intel Core i9 13900HX | 16-inch | 1600p | 240Hz | 32GB DDR5-5600 | 1TB NVMe SSD | $1,999 at B&H Photo (save $750) (Lenovo) This is a great discount on the best RTX 4080 laptop I've tested even though the price has gone up $50 since Prime Day. It's a fantastic notebook, offering performance that can often match and sometimes beat an RTX 4090-based system (see our review). There's a high-performance CPU to back it up, a decent, bright 1600p screen, and a fair amount of storage. All with a discount. 3. Zotac RTX 4070 Ti | 12GB GDDR6X | 7,680 shaders | 2,655MHz boost | $784.99 at Amazon (save $95) (Zotac) This is a straightforward card from Zotac, with a minor clock boost over the reference spec, but comes with a really neat looking cooler. The same design works well on the beefier chips, so I'm not concerned about how effective it'll be with an RTX 4070 Ti. It's only a minor saving over the base $799 reference price, but is still a great alternative if you couldn't pick up a Founders Edition card. 4. Yeyian Shoge | Core i5 13400F | RTX 4070 | 16GB DDR4-3200 | 1TB SSD | $1,239.99 at Newegg (save $210) (Yeyian) Think of the RTX 4070 as an RTX 3080 with benefits and you'll start to see that this is a great price for a new gaming PC, that probably would have been closer to $2,000 this time last year. Thankfully it's not, and this is a great low-price, high-performance gaming PC. The only thing that might cause you pause is the fact the ten-core Core i5 chip is on an older DDR4 motherboard, limiting your upgrade options. But for a resolutely gaming machine, that won't be an option until long after an upgrade path on an Intel 600 or 700-series chipset has long since closed. 5. Asus TUF Gaming VG27AQA1A | 27-inch | 1440p | VA | $239.99 at Newegg (save $10) (Asus) For the budget-conscious gamer, Asus makes a mean gaming monitor. This screen may be on the cheaper side, even costing less than some 1080p panels, yet it delivers 1440p res gaming with a 170Hz refresh rate (overclocked). Not too shabby. 6. MSI Vector | RTX 4080 | Intel Core i9 12900HX | 16GB DDR5-4800 | 1TB SSD | 1200p | 144Hz | $1,599 at Newegg (save $500) (MSI) This is the most affordable RTX 4080-based gaming laptop I've found, possibly at any time this year. It's not some hobbled GPU implementation either, using a 175W design of the graphics card to give you the full gaming performance. It's certainly not the most beautiful laptop you will see, nor the slimmest (though that helps keep it cool), and I'd rather a higher refresh rate panel and a bit more RAM, but it's a great price for an otherwise high-spec gaming machine. 7. MSI Crosshair | RTX 4070 | Intel Core I7 13620H | 16GB DDR5 | 1TB SSD | 16-inch | 1920 x 1200 | 144Hz | $1,099.99 at Best Buy (MSI) This MSI Crosshair model may only have a 1200p screen, but at least it's pretty fast with a 144Hz refresh rate. The real selling point here is that RTX 4070 (albeit the 105W version, not the full fat 140W), along with a decent Intel processor and a 1TB SSD that makes this a solid gaming platform. It's got a nice clean aesthetic too, which means it wouldn't look too out of place if you took it to your next meeting. 8. Alienware Aurora R16 | Core i7 13700F | RTX 4080 | 16GB DDR5 RAM | 1TB NVMe SSD| $1,949.99 at Dell (save $550) (Dell) This is one of the cheapest RTX 4080 gaming PCs available right now. You get a solid 16-core CPU, 16GB of DDR5 RAM, and 1TB of NVMe SSD storage. It's a solid package, just keep in mind that upgrading can be tricky with Alienware PCs. 9. Alienware 34 AW3423DWF | 34-inch | 165Hz | QD-OLED | $799.99 at Dell (save $250) (Dell) Alienware's fancy QD-OLED panel just got that little bit cheaper. It's still not exactly entry-level at $800, but think of it as a long term investment that will make every single gaming session pop. Once you've experienced per-pixel OLED-style lighting, you won't want to go back to LCD tech. You can read our Alienware QD-OLED review for more. 10. Silicon Power XS70 | 2TB | NVMe | PCIe 4.0 | 7300 MB/s Read | 6800 MB/s Write | $109.99 at Newegg (SiliconPower) The XS70 was going cheaper last month, but we've seen it pop back up in price recently. I'd perhaps wait a bit longer to see if the price dips again before picking one up. It packs rather a large bang for your buck with its fast read and write times, at least. While the software side of things may be a little lacking, we were impressed with the overall performance and value proposition of this drive. Read our Silicon Power XS70 review here. Sign Up  |    Update Profile  |    Unsubscribe Privacy Policy  |    Cookies Policy  |    Terms and Conditions CONTACT US: FEEDBACK  |    ADVERTISE Future US LLC © Full 7th Floor, 130 West 42nd Street, New York, NY, 10036