Forget Steam Machine: Grab This Upgradable RTX Gaming PC For $898

At long last, Amazon's anticipated Prime Day sales event has arrived, and practically every retailer is getting in on the action. We also finally have confirmation on pricing for Valve's also much-anticipated Steam Machine launch, which starts at $1,049 in standalone form, or $1,128 with a Steam Controller bundled. If you are hoping to stretch your dollar further than that, then one option to consider is Acer's aggressively discounted Nitro 60 gaming PC.

For what we imagine is a limited time, you can score Acer's Nitro 60 gaming PC for a low $898 at Walmart (save $551.99). That makes it $151 less expensive than the baseline Steam Machine, but what does that translate into as far the specs go?

Before we get pierced with pitchforks and lit with flames, let's address the obvious here—the form factor is very different here. Part of the value proposition with Valve's Steam Machine is that is a compact cube. It's also tuned for gaming on Steam with SteamOS preinstalled for what Valve is billing as a plug-and-play experience. That said, pricing is higher than it otherwise might be if not for the RAMageddon that is ravaging the industry.

As configured, Acer's Nitro 60 that is a couple of bucks below $900 is built around an Intel Core Ultra 5 225F processor based on Arrow Lake with 6 performance cores clocked at 3.3GHz to 4.9GHz and 4 efficient cores running at 2.7GHz to 4.4GHz for 10 total cores, 20MB of L3 cache, and a dedicated NPU rated for up to 13 TOPS.

This is paired with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 graphics card, 16GB of DDR5 memory, and a 1TB solid state drive (SSD).

Other features include:

• Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3
• 2.5Gbps LAN
• 1x USB 3.2 Gen2x2 Type-C (rear)
• 1x USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-A (rear)
• 4x USB 2.0 Type-A (rear)
• 2x USB 3.1 Gen1 Type-A (top)
• 3x DisplayPort 2.1b (rear)
• 1x HDMI 2.1b (rear)
• PS/2 Keyboard/Mouse (rear)
• 2x 3.5mm audio ports (top)
• Audio ports (rear)