Buying a new gaming PC today can be a bit of a minefield given the price of new graphics cards and the fact that almost everything is more expensive. But there are still ways to get cheap gaming PC deals if you’re willing to be a little creative, and exercise those screwdriver muscles.

Honestly, it’s not that creative, I’m just recommending pairing a cheap base PC with an affordable graphics card and combining the two to make one excellent, affordable gaming rig. Easy.

Of course that does necessitate getting the side off your new machine and installing a new component yourself. Thankfully, jamming a new GPU into your rig is one of the most straightforward upgrades you can do, and the most effective as a PC gamer, too.

It’s well worth learning how to do it, anyways.

This Ipason machine was the same price around Black Friday last year, and we recommended it then as a good base to build from and that stands today. We’d never recommend it at the $850 original price, but a full PC for $549 at Newegg is well worth the money.

It’s got a quality gaming CPU in the AMD Ryzen 5 5600G. That’s a six-core, 12-thread processor capable of running up to 4.4GHz, and it’s integrated GPU will get you gaming in a 720p pinch. That’s backed up with 16GB of DDR4 memory running at 3,200MHz, and it comes with a 500GB NVMe SSD. That’s a bit light on the storage front, but is another affordable, easy to install upgrade down the road.

On its own it’s not going to be capable of 1080p or 1440p gaming performance, however, but if you went ahead and dropped the ASRock RX 6700 XT for $350 into your Newegg basket, you’d have a system that was for less than $900.

Considering a lot of similar level gaming PCs are retailing for at least $1,200 that’s a decent saving.

If that’s still a bit out of your budget the $275 RX 6600 XT will deliver RTX 3060 level gaming at high 1080p settings for $824. 

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