{"id":1677705,"date":"2026-08-29T13:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-29T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/emowF6M8R2hWycdNET83D9"},"modified":"2026-08-29T13:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-08-29T13:00:00","slug":"ive-checked-gaming-pc-deals-every-week-for-two-years-and-im-not-exaggerating-when-i-say-there-isnt-a-single-well-priced-pc-left","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcader.org\/news\/ive-checked-gaming-pc-deals-every-week-for-two-years-and-im-not-exaggerating-when-i-say-there-isnt-a-single-well-priced-pc-left\/","title":{"rendered":"I’ve checked gaming PC deals every week for two years and I’m not exaggerating when I say there isn’t a single well-priced PC left"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Jacob Fox, hardware writer<\/div>\n
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\"PC<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>

(Image credit: Future)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This week I’ve been: <\/strong>Testing a new mouse that I am enjoying greatly but cannot yet speak about \ud83e\udd10<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Welcome to your daily dose of doomcore, and no, I don’t mean that peculiar genre of music. I mean the state of the PC gaming market. Not to be too much of a negative Nelly but things are not looking great out there.<\/p>\n

You probably didn’t need me to tell you that, but given I’ve been keeping my eye on the best deals for gaming PCs every week (minus holidays) for the past couple of years, I thought I’d share with you some more specific, cheerfully glum context. You’re welcome.<\/p>\n

Let’s take a nice trip down memory lane to check out a couple of the deals I spotted for gaming PCs around this time last year.<\/p>\n

Here we are: In an assortment I highlighted last September<\/a>, an RTX 5060 Ti rig for just $1,000. Today, the cheapest we see any just-about-decent RTX 5060 Ti gaming PC retailing for, is about $1,200\u2014this AVGPC Max for $1,209 at Newegg<\/a>, for instance. <\/p>\n

But that’s not even half of it, because you’ll notice the RAM in that $1,200 rig is DDR4, not DDR5. And if it wasn’t DDR4, you could almost certainly expect such an RTX 5060 Ti rig to have just a single 16 GB stick of DDR5 in single-channel mode.<\/p>\n

How about at the higher end? Well, there’s this RTX 5070 Ti gaming PC I also highlighted last September<\/a>. That was $1,900 for the whole package: RTX 5070 Ti, Ryzen 7 7800X3D, 32 GB of DDR5 RAM, and even a full 2 TB of storage. Y’know, back when we could recommend 2 TB of storage as a baseline for mid-range and higher rigs, while keeping a straight face.<\/p>\n

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\"An<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>

An RTX 5070 Ti gaming PC listed for a pre-memory shortage price on Best Buy last October. <\/span>(Image credit: iBuyPower, Best Buy, Internet Archive)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

And now? I think you know the deal. I actually struggle to find RTX 5070 Ti gaming PCs worth highlighting anymore\u2014the GPU seems to be more lightly stocked than others. Currently, I’ve got a PC with the same base specs listed (on sale!) <\/em>on our deals hub<\/a> for $2,400 at Newegg<\/a>. If you’re okay opting for an RX 9070 XT instead, you can lower that to $2,099 at Walmart<\/a>, which does net you a more recent X3D chip\u2014our favourite<\/a>, in fact\u2014but you’re also sacrificing 1 TB of storage.<\/p>\n

More generally, I can tell you that after looking at gaming PC deals week-in, week-out for the past couple of years, pretty much every last bastion of hope for reasonable prices has now slipped away. <\/p>\n

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\"An<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>

An RTX 5070 Ti gaming PC on sale at Newegg today for a high, post-memory shortage price. <\/span>(Image credit: Skytech, Newegg)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For quite a while and even until very recently, RX 9070 XT PCs held on to lower price tags while Nvidia PCs slipped out of stock, presumably because pre-shortage stocks were lasting longer as fewer AMD PCs tend to be scooped up by PC gamers than Nvidia ones. But recently I’ve noticed even the best deals on those seem to have slipped away. On the rare occasion there is one for a decent sub-$2,000 price, you’re very lucky if it has more than 16 GB of RAM and 1 TB of storage.<\/p>\n

The lower end of the market is particularly dire. Before the memory crisis, there was quite an abundance of RTX 5060 gaming PCs going on sale for under $1,000, sometimes actually for well under this. This one I highlighted last October<\/a>, for instance, cost just $749. It seemed to come with just a single 16 GB stick of DDR5 memory, but these days you’re looking at almost $1,000 for the same thing<\/a>, and that’s if you’re lucky <\/em>(even deals like that are getting quite rare).<\/p>\n

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