Build A Great AMD Or Intel Gaming PC For Under $1500 With These Prime Day Deals

It's Prime Day, folks, and you know what that means: killer deals on some seriously fast PC parts. While the GPU market has been struggling recently, the rest of the PC parts market is ripe for the picking, and so we've put in a couple of hours poring over the Prime Day deals to find the absolute juiciest discounts for our dear readers.

As is tradition, we've picked out a huge pile of parts with some pretty darn decent prices. Not all of these parts are on deep discounts, but all of them are the best prices available for the class of part that they are. We're going to present you with all of the component choices we selected, and it's up to you to make selections that suit your needs and budget. We've got both AMD and Intel recommendations for you, so stick around to see them all.

Intel-Powered PC Gaming For Pennywise Prime Day Prices

First up we have the build that we actually recommend today, because it's really the better machine of the two for most purposes. Yeah, we said it. We're pointing out the Intel Core Ultra 7 265K CPU with its twenty CPU cores and 5.5 GHz boost clock. After all of Intel's performance-enhancing patches, Core Ultra performs very well in both productivity applications and high-frame-rate gaming, and this price on the Core Ultra 7 265K simply can't be beat. We've paired it with an MSI PRO Z890-P WiFi that might not be the best choice for extreme overclocking, but it has no less than four M.2 sockets and Wi-Fi 7 support at a bargain basement price.


Notably, buying this CPU will qualify you for Intel's Spring promotion that is still going on until the end of the month. You get free copies of Dying Light: The Beast and Sid Meier's Civilization VII. Claiming these copies is a bit of a pain; you'll have to install an application that verifies your CPU. Still, they're Steam keys, so it's not a bad deal for free stuff.


The Core Ultra 7 265K does not come with a CPU cooler, so you'll need one, but you don't need to splurge on a finicky AIO just keep this chip running cool. The ID COOLING FROZN A410 has a pair of 120-mm fans on either side of a thick stack of fins, connected to the CPU socket by four heatpipes. This cooler won't have any problem with the Ultra 7 265K as long as you aren't trying to run Folding @ Home on it or something.

To get the best gaming performance out of a Core Ultra processor, you're going to want to enable 200S Boost Mode in the motherboard's BIOS. Doing so sets the memory speed to 8000 MT/s by default, though, so you'll have to have memory that is capable of such a speed. Thankfully there's been a huge price drop on a Patriot Viper kit with exactly such specifications. 48GB of DDR5-8000 memory for $159.99 is a steal.

AMD Ryzen CPUs On Some Really Sweet Prime Day Discounts

Of course, if you're not willing to mess with even automatic overclocking, or if you simply hate the idea of having a CPU with heterogeneous CPU cores, there's always AMD options. Don't get us wrong, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D will offer similar or better gaming performance even in the worst case. It's also over $80 more expensive, though. The Ryzen 7 9700X and Ryzen 7 7700X are still great options for excellent gaming performance as well. We've selected an ASUS Prime X870-P Wifi motherboard because it offers the same four M.2 sockets and Wi-Fi 7 support at a really rather reasonable price.


For our memory, we've offered up two options, both speedy 6400 MT/s kits with low latency. The more expensive of the two offers you a whopping 64GB of RAM; since it's inadvisable to load up Socket AM5 with four RAM sticks, you might want to buy all the RAM you'll ever need. However, 32GB is just fine for any current typical gaming-and-multitasking workload. For the cooler, we picked Thermalright's Assasin X 120 Refined SE, an extremely basic 120-mm tower cooler. These AMD CPUs use less power and make less heat than Intel's Core Ultra chip, so this simple one-fan tower cooler will do just fine.

The Graphics Card Market Is a Dumpster Fire Ablaze

We've picked out four different graphics cards at basically three performance tiers. Unfortunately, there are just not any graphics cards in the high-end from any vendor that are reasonably priced right now. You could spend $100 or more over MSRP for a GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, or more than $200 over MSRP for a Radeon RX 9070 XT, but those purchases are hard to justify.

For our selections, we picked a Sparkle Arc B570 at $259 as our entry-level card. It's a bit overpriced, but it's a fair value even at $259, with better performance than the Radeon RX 7600, and more video RAM than the GeForce RTX 4060. Moving up a tier, we picked out the Radeon RX 9060 XT and GeForce RTX 5060 Ti, both in their 16GB versions. These GPUs are excellent for 1440p gaming performance, even with ray-tracing on. The GeForce card is a fair whack more expensive despite offering similar performance; you could argue that DLSS and MFG justify the price jump.

The last selection we made is a reference-model Radeon RX 7900 XT, idiosyncratically priced at $646.81. This card is competitive with the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti in raster performance and similar to a GeForce RTX 5070 in ray-traced games. It also has a massive 20GB of video RAM on board. This is the only GPU priced below MSRP in our selections, and it's actually a killer deal, with capable 4K performance.

Speedy Storage Selections For Superior Sale Savings

No less than five drives make up our storage options. For the price-conscious, it's hard to beat the Silicon Power UD90; 2TB for just $97.97. The Fikwot FX991 offers twice as much storage for about twice as much money at $189.99. Neither of these drives are lightning quick, but both are capable PCIe 4.0 SSDs with reads over 5GB/second.

If you need more speed, the Acer Predator GM7000 is a 2TB NVMe SSD with a DRAM cache and a super-fast Innogrit IG5236 controller. It's a bit more expensive, but the responsiveness may be worth it to some. For those who really want a fast drive, there's the Samsung SSD 9100 PRO, which is $189.99 like the Fikwot drive, but only 2TB. Still, at 37% off, this is the most affordable 2TB PCIe 5.0 drive we've seen yet. This SSD is capable of reads at over 14 GB/second!

Lastly, we're throwing in a hard drive deal. Yes, in 2025. The WD Black series is a modern 7200 RPM hard drive that uses CMR instead of shingles, and stores 10TB of data for only $189.99. That's only 2.5x the cost-effectiveness of the Fikwot drive above, but if you have a lot of media or other bulk data that doesn't need SSD responsiveness, this hard drive will still serve admirably.

Power Supplies And Curated Chassis For Your New Build

Three power supplies stuck out to us as great deals this Prime Day. If you don't need a native 12V-2X6 power connector for a modern NVIDIA GPU, then the Toughpower GF1 850W unit will serve for basically any gaming PC that isn't rocking an RTX 5090. It's modular, too, which is convenient. If you DO need that native 12V-2X6 connector to avoid using adapters, the MSI MAG A850GL is ATX 3.1 capable and thus includes the necessary power connector. Meanwhile, if you're really into PSU overkill, there's a pretty decent deal on an ASUS TUF unit with fully 1000W of peak power output.


For cases, we picked out a perfect pair. For the price conscious, the Raidmax INFINITA i802 AIR is a mid-tower ATX chassis that includes four RGB LED fans pre-installed. It has all the features the kids love, like a power supply shroud and a wrap-around window. It's a steal at just $50.99. On the other hand, the Fractal Design Pop XL Air is a larger full-tower case that includes no less than five fans. It has more room inside for components, if you're the type to stuff your PC full of parts. It's not technically on sale, but you're not going to beat this price; this case normally goes for $129.99.

Our Recommended Builds For Glorious PC Gaming Goodness

We'll present two recommended builds for you, one Intel and one AMD. Both stay under the $1500 budget we proposed in the headline. First up is the Intel build, which will offer the best gaming and productivity performance in most scenarios. It's a highly-optimized build with a fast 20-core CPU, a potent 20GB GPU, and 2TB of NVMe storage. For the money, this is an incredible gaming PC with solid 4K gaming performance and plenty of RAM.


Our AMD recommended build loses some raw performance for arguably more elegant part selections. The X3D CPU will improve minimum frame rates in games, while the faster Predator GM7000 SSD will reduce loading hitches and improve boot times slightly. The big downgrade is the GPU; the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti is simply not quite as fast as the Radeon RX 7900 XT. However, it does draw a lot less power, and it also is a more modern architecture with a superior software stack. That may be important to you over the brute force of the Intel system above.

Obviously, the decision is yours to make, and you could choose an entirely different arrangement of components for your personal gaming PC. You, obviously, could even select something that we didn't show off on this page. If you do, though, come back and let us know in the comments what you found!