Build A Killer Gaming PC For Under $1000 With These Amazon Prime Day Deals
With some of these games, particularly a few of the newer titles, you might be looking at your trusty old gaming PC and thinking it's time for an upgrade. We wouldn't fault you, but we implore you to consider a whole new system. CPUs and storage are becoming more important to gaming performance than they have been in twenty years, and if you simply slap a new graphics card into your old Devil's Canyon rig, you'll be missing out on most of the performance that GPU could grant you.
Between inflation, shortages, and more inflation, you might think that you're going to have to dig deep in your pocketbook to part out a new PC. It isn't going to be "cheap" no matter what, but $1000 isn't worth what it used to be, and that's a pretty solid price point for a new gaming powerhouse. Yes, indeed; you don't have to spend multiple thousands of dollars to start playing your favorite PC games in high resolutions and high framerates. Check out this build right here:
- AMD Ryzen 5 7600 3.8 GHz 6-Core Processor: $212 at Amazon
- MSI PRO B650M-A WiFi Micro ATX AM5 Motherboard: $134.99 at Amazon
- G.Skill Flare X5 2×16GB DDR5-6000 CL30 RAM: $99.99 at Amazon
- ADATA XPG GAMMIX S70 Blade 2TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD: $89.99 at Best Buy
- PowerColor Fighter Radeon RX 6700 XT 12GB Video Card: $299.99 at Amazon
- Cooler Master MasterBox Q300L MicroATX Chassis: $39.99 at Amazon
- Thermaltake Toughpower 750W 80+ Gold Semi-modular ATX PSU: $89.99 at Amazon
Total Price: $966.94 with free Prime shippingThis build has everything you need for an awesome gaming experience in 2023: a fast six-core Zen 4-based processor, 32GB of speedy RAM, a very quick NVMe SSD, and a powerful Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card with enough video RAM to turn up the settings in every game. The Toughpower PSU is both reliable and efficient, and MSI PRO B650M-A motherboard includes dual M.2 sockets for SSDs, 2.5-Gigabit Ethernet, and Wi-Fi 6E. Best of all, the Socket AM5 platform gives you an upgrade path in the future, once AMD releases its Ryzen 8000 series CPUs.
Still, we understand there are likely to be some complaints about this build, both from AMD haters and from folks who simply want more horsepower. To that end, here's a similarly-priced and just-about-as-capable Intel-based build. Also, at the end, we'll offer some extra choices by component if you simply don't like ours.
- Intel Core i5-13500 14-Core Processor: $247.99 at Best Buy
- Gigabyte B760M-DS3H AX Micro ATX LGA 1700 Motherboard: $139.99 at Amazon
- TEAMGROUP T-Create Expert 2×16GB DDR5-6000 CL30 RAM: $89.99 at Amazon
- Silicon Power XS70 2TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD: $89.97 at Amazon
- Acer Predator BiFrost OC Arc A770 16GB Video Card: $299.99 at Amazon
- Deepcool MATREXX 40 MicroATX Chassis: $44.99 at Amazon
- Thermaltake Toughpower 750W 80+ Gold Semi-modular ATX PSU: $89.99 at Amazon
Total Price: $1002.91 with free Prime shipping.This alternate build is a few dollars more expensive, but for the price you get an Intel processor that offers you six Golden Cove CPU cores and eight Crestmont E-cores. This will considerably improve performance in non-gaming workloads, and could help offset background tasks while gaming. We gained 4GB of video RAM by switching to an Intel Arc A770 graphics card, which, while not quite as fast as the RX 6700 XT in pure raster games, generally does better in ray-traced titles.
If you're not satisfied with either of these builds, check out some alternate Prime Day deals on components:
CPUs:
- Intel's Core i7-13700K is down from $419 to $373; this is our best value for a high-end gaming rig.
- Intel's Core i5-12600K is all the way down to $179, which is a hilariously-low price for a 10-core CPU.
- AMD's Ryzen 7 5800X has fallen to just $215; an incredible drop-in upgrade for most older Socket AM4 systems.
- Alternatively, if you've a need for cores, AMD's flagship Ryzen 9 7950X3D is $100 off right now at $599.
GPUs:
- It's hard to beat that PowerColor Fighter Radeon RX 6700 XT we noted above at $299.99.
- However, just $261 for a ZOTAC GeForce RTX 3060 12GB card is also a pretty fair value.
- Also, Zotac's RTX 4080 Trinity 16GB card at $989 is nearly one-third cheaper than MSRP!
- Intel's Arc A750 has serious 1080p gaming chops, and it's only $199 right now.
SSDs:
- Acer's Predator GM7000 is a super-quick PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD; grab a 1TB gumstick for $49.99.
- Teamgroup's MP34 PCIe 3.0 SSD has a DRAM cache and DirectStorage support at just $149 for 4TB.
- The SATA Crucial MX500 is slower, but it also doesn't take up a precious M.2 slot. 4TB for $164.99.
- On other hand, Crucial's T700 is the fastest SSD we've tested. 4TB for $389.99, 35% off list price.
- ADATA's Legend 960 is among the very fastest PCIe 4.0 drives, and it's only $104.99 for 2TB.
- Finally, if it's bulk storage you need, how about 14TB WD Ultrastar datacenter HDDs for $165.99?
Out of these deals, we strongly recommend checking out the storage, because as we noted yesterday, it's likely that prices on storage and memory products are going to either stagnate or even trend upward in the coming months. If you're after some solid-state storage, speedy or not, now is the time to buy.
Even though we've spent a few hours on it, it's likely that this post barely scratches the surface of the Prime Day component deals out there. If you do your own digging and find a golden price, post it up in the comments below and let us know what you located.
