The GPU in this Black Friday gaming PC supercharged my graphics, and it's $600 off
If you're anything like me, and you're looking for the best Black Friday gaming PC deal, you're driven to one component above all others: the GPU. It's only natural. Sure it's not the only thing that matters—you'll struggle to get the most from the most powerful graphics cards if you pair it with a bottom-of-the-barrel processor—but it's certainly the star of the show. And the RTX 3080 Ti would take pretty much any gaming PC to the next level, like the iBuyPower Trace MR, which is on sale now for $600 off at Best Buy.
That brings the PC down to a decent $2,599. Considering it hasn't been tremendously easy to have any means of buying one of Nvidia's latest crop of cards at all since they launched, let alone find one for this much less than $3,000, this isn't bad at all.
iBuyPower Trace MR | Intel Core i7 11700KF | Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti |16GB RAM | 1TB NVMe SSD | $3,199.99 $2,599.99 at Best Buy (save $600)
At a decent price, you're getting a solid computer draped around one of the most powerful (and elusive) graphics cards around. With a strong Rocket Lake CPU and a super-speedy NVMe SSD this machine will be a nice upgrade for most, and in all sorts of ways. At the very least you're getting a new GPU, and in the last 12 months, that's a win.
Naturally, it's still quite the chunk of cash. I forked out for a 3080 Ti build about six months ago, and frankly my wallet's still complaining. That said, coming from my RX 480—dependable, perfectly capable of running games satisfactorily at 1080p—the 3080 Ti was a revelation. Forza Horizon 5 at 4K max settings? Easy. Far Cry 6 with every setting at their highest? Piece of cake. Football Manager? Much the same, actually.
But you get my point, and after spending more money than I ever thought I would on a video card, I've never looked back. And while it doesn't feature on our best graphics cards list, the 3080 and 3090 do, and the 3080 Ti really is the sweet spot: It's plenty more expensive than the already 4K-ready 3080, but it's close to the power of the 3090, with a less eye-watering price.
That said, even though the 3080-Ti is powerful enough to contend with high-end creative tasks, you may want to look at a package with other, stronger, components if you want a machine for more than just gaming. The 8-core/16-thread Core i7 11700KF is certainly no slouch, but you can certainly go bigger. You may also want to add to the 16GB of RAM—so here's the best RAM for gaming you can choose from—but for gaming, this is a PC that'll keep you at maximum settings for quite a few years to come.
But speaking of additions, you won't last long with that 1TB of NVMe storage if you're playing games seriously. Install just a few of PC gaming's mightiest storage hogs and that'll go in a flash, even though you'll feel the benefit of rapid loads times considerably if you're coming to this machine from an older drive. Here are the best SSDs for gaming if you're in need of a top-up.