Site icon Technology Hardware

I’m picking out the best Black Friday gaming deals because my near 20-years as a PC tech journo have all been leading up to this

I’m picking out the best Black Friday gaming deals because my near 20-years as a PC tech journo have all been leading up to this

Refresh

One of my favorite metrics for talking about SSDs isn’t about their raw performance—honestly, almost any NVMe SSD is going to be delivering performance that will shine when you’re gaming—it’s about their cost per gigabyte. We always need more space in our gaming PCs, especially with the size of game installs only growing larger, and so picking a 2 TB drive as your Black Friday SSD deal is a smart choice in terms of space, but also in terms of value, too.

And this SiliconPower drive is the best-value SSD we’ve spotted this deals season. At just $0.04 per gigabyte that’s a lot of Steam library capacity for not a lot of cash. Sure, it’s not the fastest PCIe 4.0 SSD, but I would wager you would never notice the difference in general gaming usage between this and the speediest drives around.

And it’s bigger brother is only $0.05 per gigabyte for the 4 TB version. Four whole terabytes of storage. He chomk.

(Image credit: CyberPowerPC)

Who doesn’t love a PC that’s complete overkill? No-one… so long as you can afford it, that is. This CyberPowerPC is both overkill and actually almost affordable, too. With a $370 price cut, this RTX 4080 Super-powered rig is $2,330 at B&H right now and is chock full of the stuff we normally castigate system builders for skimping on. Namely, there’s a hoofing great 64 GB of DDR5 memory and a mega-chonk 4 TB of SSD storage inside it.

The big boi 1 TB version of the Legion Go handheld gaming PC is now on offer for around the same price as the 512 GB version, which is a pretty damned good price for a powerful wee system. It’s also a very interesting handheld, in that it’s not just the same sort of Steam Deck clone other manufacturers were looking to put out.

Okay, it’s not Ayaneo levels of interesting—not like an outstanding DS-a-like—but it does come with detachable controllers with an odd FPS mode. I’m not 100% sold on that, but as a handheld it’s still an ace machine, especially at this price.

(Image credit: Future)

You always need more storage, right? Especially in these times of simply MASSIVE game installs, and we’d suggest that if you’re going to upgrade your SSD then a 1 TB drive is going to be the minimum you should be looking to stick into your rig. And if you are buying a new 1 TB drive then the Lexar NM790 for $60 at Amazon is a winner.

It’s about as fast as any PCIe 4.0 SSD around, so at 6c per GB you can hardly go wrong.

Logitech has done its damnedest to kill this wee rodent, releasing multiple fresh iterations of the classic Logitech G Pro gaming mouse recently. Yet we would still happily recommend you spend your Black Friday gaming mouse money on the original. It’s still a great gaming mouse: it’s simple, effective, and rather affordable right now.

You may get an updated DPI that goes up to 44,000 DPI on the new sensor, but realistically most of us are going to be just fine with the 25,000 DPI optical sensor on the old G Pro mouse.

(Image credit: Yeyian)

Golly. That’s a lot of Black Friday gaming PC for the money. When you’re playing fantasy PC shopping it’s always the top-end machine that you look out for, but when a company such as Yeyian drops an RTX 4080 Super gaming rig for under $1,900 that’s going to get our collective attentions.

Sure, the Core i7 CPU is a couple generations old now, but it’s still a solid 16-core chip with some serious gaming chops. Unlike Intel’s most recent chips… You’re also getting a full 32 GB DDR5-6000 memory and a 1 TB SSD into the bargain.

But obvs. it’s that RTX 4080 Super GPU that is going to get all the plaudits, and rightly so. RTX 4090 aside, the RTX 4080 Super is the best Nvidia GPU you can reasonably buy today, and even at this discounted price accounts for effectively half the price of this entire machine.

Our Andy sure does covet the Audeze Maxwell, and for good reason, it’s an absolutely outstanding wireless gaming headset. And almost an audiophile one, too. The planar magnetic drivers are simply stunning, and unlike other PM drivers I’ve used haven’t needed to be worn in to make them sound great. Yes, I have a pair and, no, Andy you can’t have them.

If I’m not using my speakers then I’m using the Audeze Maxwells, and sometimes I’ll stick em on just for that extra slice of immersion. The sound quality is incredible, and every time I put them back on for a session I’m reminded all over again just why I love them so well.

And, now for $270 at Amazon, they’re not a bad price considering what you normally have to pay for planar magnetic audiophile-level headphones. And these are wireless…

For $140 less than the price of the RTX 4070 Super, the RX 7800 XT delivers gaming performance that is definitely not $100 worse in terms of value. The AMD card may still struggle on heavily ray traced games, but when it comes to standard raster performance the RX 7800 XT is almost on par with the far more expensive Nvidia GPU.

At $440 at Newegg, that makes this XFX version one of the best-value Black Friday GPU deals around today.

(Image credit: Future)

The Black Friday graphics card deals might just be the most volatile around right now, but if you want a quick snapshot of the best prices on each of the key current-gen GPUs then here’s a list of the ones we recommend right now.

(Image credit: Future)

Okay, so the Corsair TC100 Relaxed deal 👇 is pretty much all the gaming chair you could want, but if you still feel the need for a little advice on how to pick out exactly what chair you should be chasing, our Jacob has some sage advice.

Five things I always tell people before they buy their first gaming chair

Well, that’s done then. The best Black Friday gaming chair deal has just dropped and won’t be topped. The Corsair TC100 Relaxed is not just a great budget seat, it’s also just a really good gaming chair in its own right. And now that it’s been given a chonky $70 discount it’s well below the $200 mark and is just an absolute bargain for a chair of this quality.

I don’t think it’s sticking my neck out too far to say there won’t be another Black Friday gaming chair deal to better this one.

(Image credit: Future)

So, you want to pick from the best Black Friday gaming laptop deals, but don’t really know what you should be looking out for? Well, we’ve picked out a selection of quality deals in our own deal lists, but it’s also worth taking some time to think about what exactly you need and what makes sense for you.

As part of our suite of helpful tips, our Jacob has compiled a list of five things you need to think about when you’re looking to buy your first gaming laptop. And even if it isn’t your first, there are some real salient points to consider. Give ’em a look.

Five things I want you to think about before you buy your first gaming laptop

I know we’ve got it up there 👆 already in the top deals slot at number one, but it bears repeating that this is an excellent price for a full RTX 4070 Ti Super gaming PC. That Nvidia GPU is running with the same silicon as the RTX 4080, albeit a slightly cut down version, yet it gets mighty close in terms of gaming performance.

But it’s not just the headline-grabbing graphics card choice which sets this $1,650 ABS system from Newegg apart, it’s also got a quality supporting spec, too. The eight-core, 16-thread AMD Zen 4 CPU is super reliable, and a great gaming chip, and the full 32 GB of DDR5 is impressive, too. You could maybe hope for a 2 TB SSD to go along with that, but you’d be wishing to the wind at this price; the 1 TB drive is fine for the bizarrely named Aeolian-M Ruby.

Seriously, ABS, who comes up with these names?

If that doesn’t work for you we have a bunch of other Black Friday gaming PCs with impressive discounts and great specs for you to check out.

(Image credit: Future)

Five things I always tell people before they buy their first gaming monitor

If you want a little assistance figuring out what you ought to be looking for when you’re buying your first gaming monitor I’ve got a little advice for you based on my many years of prodding and squaring my eyeballs with the best screens around.

And once you’re done checking that out, have a look at our Black Friday gaming monitor deals hub, because there are some stellar discounts on some great panels out there already.

If I’m buying a Black Friday gaming laptop then I might find it tough to look past the excellent Asus TUF A14 I recently had the chance to test. It’s a surprisingly premium 14-inch gaming laptop considering it’s part of Asus’ more affordable TUF range. It’s beautifully designed, remarkably slim, and comes with AMD’s outstanding Strix Point CPU.

And it’s heavily discounted, by $150, over at Walmart right now, with the Asus TUF A14 for just $1,349.

Everyone wants to be heard, right? And if you want to be heard with absolute clarity then there’s only one choice: a Shure microphone. There’s a reason that you will see Shure mics whenever you watch the livestream of any popular podcast, and that’s because they are the best-sounding, easiest-to-use professional-quality microphone around. The latest release, the Shure MV7+ has gone straight in as the best podcasting mic, and it’s already on offer this Black Friday.

If that’s a little too rich for your blood, however, there is another. One of the other recent Shure releases is the Shure MV6. It’s $100 cheaper than the MV7+, even without a Black Friday discount. It’s still an outstanding mic and is our current pick as the best gaming microphone around today.

(Image credit: Lexar | WD)

One of the simplest upgrades you can make to your laptop or gaming PC—so long as your system has a spare slot—is to jam a whole new SSD into your machine. Let’s face it, we always need more storage space because, after all, it’s a pain having to install and uninstall games, juggling your installed Steam library just so you can fit it around your Windows install.

When you can pick up cheap 2 TB SSDs for well under $100, and really good 2 TB drives for just over $100, it’s really an upgrade worth making with the current Black Friday SSD deals going down.

(Image credit: Future)

We’ve been creating a suite of advice columns to help when you’re looking to buy your first piece of PC gaming tech. I’m a total GPU nerd and have been obsessed with graphics cards since I first started as a PC gaming tech hack back in the early 2000s, so this is one of the first ones I’ve created.

Five things I always tell people before they buy their first graphics card

Did someone say AMD GPU?

In light of new graphics cards coming from all three of the discrete GPU manufacturers in the coming months I’m cautiously optimistic that we’ll actually see some good graphics card deals this Black Friday week. And, case in point, here’s one of the best current-gen AMD Radeon GPUs, the RX 7800 XT, on sale for $60 under the original $499 MSRP.

(Image credit: Asus)

If you want to get yourself a brand new gaming laptop, but baulk at paying gaming laptop prices, then this Asus machine should be your Black Friday go-to. It’s just $700 for a full system that will deliver gaming performance well beyond what your standard RTX 4050 laptop can for the same money.

It’s an all-AMD setup, with a Radeon RX 7700S GPU and a Ryzen 7 7735HS CPU. It’s got a high refresh 16:10 screen, 16 GB of DDR5 memory, and the only thing I don’t rate is that 512 GB SSD. It’s a bit miserly in 2024 with the sort of size game installs we’re getting, but it’s also an easy upgrade down the line.

And hey, we’ve got Black Friday SSD deals for days.

(Image credit: iBuyPower | ASRock)

A full gaming PC setup, including mouse, keyboard, and gaming monitor for just $800? Yup, it is possible and no, it won’t be a question of getting some ancient rig with an old RTX 3050 graphics card… or worse, no graphics card at all!

This is a full iBuyPower system (including mouse and keyboard) which is on sale right now for a penny under $700, and comes with an RTX 4060, an excellent budget Core i5 CPU, 16 GB DDR5-5200 RAM, and a full 1 TB SSD. Stick a 27-inch 1080p gaming monitor with a 165 Hz refresh rate into the mix and there you have it; an outstanding budget gaming PC setup out of the box.

Win.

If you want to get yourself an OLED gaming monitor, and not one of those rubbish 27-inch 1440p jobbies, then the Black Friday gaming monitor deals are where it’s at. Most specifically a pair of 32-inch 4K panels, one with a Samsung QD-OLED and the other with a slightly brighter LG WOLED display. Both are great, but will suit different sizes of bank account.

The first one I want to highlight is actually my favorite wee gaming keyboard. It’s the one I have sitting on my desk at home, and the one I use every single day, whether it’s for work or to game on. The Mountain Everest 60 has been my go-to keeb since it first landed on my desk and that hasn’t changed even after all the excellent boards I’ve cast my digits over since.

Right now the Everest 60 is just $40 at Amazon for Prime Members, but even at $50 without entry to Jeff’s Gang it’s still a steal and our current pick as the best budget gaming keyboard.

It’s diddy, RGB-lit, has fully hot-swappable switches and is beautifully dampened to deliver a fantastic typing experience. You might say I’m a bit of a fan.

link

Exit mobile version