Black Friday 2022 is shaping up to be a good season for gaming PC deals. That’s because this will be the first Black Friday where RTX 30 series video cards aren’t marked up over MSRP. Lower video card prices also means lower prices on prebuilt gaming PCs equipped with these same GPUs. Also. with video card supply no longer an issue, you’ll be able to order a gaming PC and expect to receive it in a very reasonable time frame.
Walmart Black Friday Gaming PC Deals
Walmart doesn’t have too many Black Friday gaming PC deals, but the ones they have are quite good. You’ll find some fantastic deals on on prebuilt gaming PCs from IBUYPOWER.
Dell Black Friday Gaming PC Deals
The Dell Black Friday Sale includes deals on both the Alienware Aurora and Dell XPS gaming PCs. The Alienware Aurora certainly has gaming in its DNA; it’s sleek, shiny, colorful, and include more customization options and better cooling than the XPS desktops to make your ultimate tricked out gaming PC. The XPS, on the other hand, boasts a simpler, more understated design with fewer options but at an extremely reasonable price point. In terms of gaming performance, both will do the job very well.
Check out our Dell Black Friday article or the latest Dell Black Friday ad more deals on laptops, PCs, and gaming monitors.
HP Gaming PC Deals
These are the newly redesigned HP ENVY, and OMEN models for 2022. With the exception of the very inexpensive HP Pavilion RTX 3060 gaming PC for under $1K, the rest of these configs are once again equipped with the best-in-class 12th gen Intel Alder Lake processors. Some of these configs are customizable; the upgrades we’ve selected emphasize harder to DIY components like the CPU and GPU while leaving the RAM and storage options completely stock. That’s because it’s often a much cheaper route to go find the best deal on your own RAM and SSD and then install it yourself.
Check out our HP Black Friday article for more deals on laptops and PCs.
Best Buy Black Friday Gaming PC Deals
Best Buy offers a wider selection of Black Friday gaming PC deals from more brands like IBUYPOWER, CyberPowerPC, Acer, and even Lenovo.
HP OMEN 45L RTX 3080 Gaming PC Deal
The 2022 OMEN 45L is HP’s flagship gaming PC. We haven’t really seen any mainstream vendor feature a more rugged cooling system than what we see here. The 45L is a voluminous chassis with three intake fans for excellent airflow. Even more impressive is the beefy 240mm liquid cooling system (upgradeable to 360mm for $80) mounted in its own compartment at the top of the case, dubbed the “Cryo Chamber”. That allows for cooling that rivals enthusiast DIY systems.
New Release: Alienware Aurora R15 Intel Core i9 Raptor Lake GeForce RTX 4090 Gaming PC
with Cryo-Tech Watercooling and 1350W Power Supply
New for the 2022-2023 season, the Alienware Aurora R15 is the first ever Dell PC equipped with both the 13th generation Intel Raptor Lake processor and the RTX 40 series GPU. The Intel Core i9-13900KF boasts a turbo-boosted clock speed of 5.8GHz and a whopping 24 cores and 32 threads. It’s definitely more powerful than the i9 Alder Lake, and it gives AMD’s flagship AMD Ryzen 9 7950X a run for its money.
The RTX 4090 is far and away the most powerful video card you can get right now. No other GPU, either from NVIDIA or from AMD, comes close. As a reference, the RTX 4090 is about 110{2c093b5d81185d1561e39fad83afc6c9d2e12fb4cca7fd1d7fb448d4d1554397} faster at 4K gaming than the already impressive RTX 3080. It’s about 60{2c093b5d81185d1561e39fad83afc6c9d2e12fb4cca7fd1d7fb448d4d1554397} faster than the previous king, the RTX 3090 Ti. That could very well be the single biggest performance upgrade within a single generational gap for the GeForce line of cards.
Should you upgrade your gaming PC?
Of course the answer completely depends on your situation. However, in terms of technical advancements, both the newer CPUs and newer GPUs this time around are significant improvements over their predecessors.
Gaming CPUs to consider
The Intel Core i7 Alder Lake CPU is Intel’s 12th gen processor and a rather significant leap in power compared to any of the previous Intel chips. It’s definitely one of the best upgrades you could make on the Intel platform, especially considering most of the previous Core i7 revisions have been incremental. There is an even newer processor out now, the 13th gen Raptor Lake, but it’s too new to see any good deals on this CPU and the improvement over Alder Lake is not worth the price premium.
On the AMD side, the Ryzen 7000 series processors are also a noticeable step up. However, these are the newest generation processors and are not going to be on sale as readily as the AMD 6000 and 5000 series CPUs. On that note, the AMD 6000 is just an incremental upgraded over the 5000 series and you should consider getting one or the other depending on the deals available.
Gaming GPUs to consider
The RTX 30 series video cards are a huge improvement over the RTX 20 series video cards. The RTX 3060 Ti, for example, a “mid-range” card, is as powerful as the RTX 2080 SUPER, the previous generations “high-end” card. If you own any video card prior to that generation, then this will probably be your single best upgrade you can make. Of course the RTX 40 series cards that just came out are an even better performer, but with the cheapest RTX 40 series card starting at over $1000, the value proposition just isn’t there.
AMD has decent video cards. The AMD Radeon RX 6850 XT is a tad slower than the RTX 3080 and the RX 6700 XT is a tad slower than the RTX 3070, but these cards lack DLSS and underperform in raytracing performance. That said, gaming PCs equipped with these AMD cards could potentially cost several hundred dollars cheaper than their NVIDIA equivalents. You shouldn’t count them out if you’re taking to get the most bang for your buck.
Looking for more discounts? Take a look at our best Black Friday deals of 2022.