Forget The PS5 Pro, Build A Budget Gaming PC With These Prime Day Deals

It won't surprise anyone to hear that Hot Hardware is staffed by PC gaming stalwarts who (mostly) balk at the idea of playing games on consoles. After all, you have a limited game selection, few choices in terms of input devices, and you're restricted to whatever quality-versus-performance compromise the developer decided on.

The conventional wisdom is that PC gaming is great, but really expensive. You don't have to spend a huge bundle to get a killer gaming PC, though, and that's especially true right now with Amazon's Prime Day sales going on. Come along with us as we peruse Amazon's best deals on PC parts.

For gaming, you need at least six CPU cores, but eight or more is even better, as it leaves extra CPU on the table for background tasks. It's also nice for the occasional multi-threaded workload. Right now there's an excellent deal on the AMD Ryzen 7 7700X, which has eight hot-clocked Zen 4 CPU cores with simultaneous multi-threading, offering a full 16 threads of Ryzen power.

If you prefer Intel, you can't go wrong with the Core i5-12600KF at just $139. This chip has six fast Golden Cove P-cores and an additional four Gracemont E-cores to handle background workloads. It also neatly sidesteps any Raptor Lake stability concerns. While it lacks the extra cache of the newer LGA 1700 CPUs, using fast DDR5 memory makes up a surprising amount of the difference in our testing.

You'll need a CPU cooler for these chips, and there are two great deals today. First up is the beloved classic, Cooler Master's Hyper 212, this time in "Spectrum V3" form with included ARGB fan. While the venerable Hyper212 isn't the best cooler on the market anymore, it will serve for either of our CPUs at stock settings, and it's just $13 right now.

If you instead are interested in overclocking, check out the Thermalright Peerless Assassin 140 dual-tower cooler. This is the big brother of the popular "PA120", and it offers cooling performance competitive with even liquid-coolers. It will give you plenty of headroom for Performance Boost Overdrive or manual overclocking.

As for motherboards, we've got one each for our AMD and Intel CPUs. For the Ryzen chip, we selected the MSI PRO B650-S WiFi, which is a businesslike motherboard that eschews RGB LED accents in favor of pure functionality, including 2.5-Gigabit LAN, 2x2 Wi-Fi 6E, and a pair of PCIe 4.0 M.2 sockets. It's a fully-equipped platter at a bargain basement price for Prime Day.

The Gigabyte B760M-C is our choice for the Intel platform, and it's a bit less expensive but that's because it does step back a bit on features. The integrated Wi-Fi is Wi-Fi 6, and the Ethernet connection is 1-Gigabit. It actually gains a third M.2 socket, though, and it also has Q-Flash support, meaning you never have to worry about a failed BIOS update. For the money, you can't beat it.

It's hard for us to recommend less than 32GB of RAM at this stage, so we've picked out two 32GB kits as well as an amazing deal on 64GB of speedy DDR5 RAM. Two of the kits are from relative newcomer Silicon Power, who is offering 6000 MT/s DDR5 memory with standard 1.35V voltage for crazy cheap. The pair of 16GB sticks comes out to $85 right now, while the 64GB kit includes RGB LED accents and is going for just $135.

If you're serious about high performance, though, we'll instead recommend this set of Corsair Vengeance RAM, currently 13% off at $99.99. It's the same 6000 MT/s as the Silicon Power kit above, but it runs much tighter sub-timings, and as a result it could offer a touch of extra performance. It's also dark grey, which might match our motherboards a little better, if you care about the aesthetics.

We also found some great deals on storage, too. The pick of the litter is the ADATA Premium SSD, which you can acquire in 2TB form for just $104 if you're an Amazon Prime subscriber. That's a crazy price for a super-fast SSD with onboard DRAM cache. Alternatively, if you don't care about the DRAM cache, the Crucial P3 Plus is still a pretty speedy SSD, and at $199.49 for 2TB, how can you complain?

Once again, we do have an option for folks looking for a high-speed SSD: the Acer Predator GM7000. It's still PCIe 4.0, not 5.0, but for $20 over the Crucial drive you get one of the very fastest PCIe 4.0 SSDs in 4TB capacity. This is an amazing deal on a ton of crazy-fast solid-state storage, so don't miss out.

Of course, the pièce de résistance of any gaming PC is going to be the graphics card. We've made six selections today, which we're dividing vaguely into entry-level, mid-range, and performance-class categories. First up, the entry GPUs: we've picked a deeply discounted Radeon RX 6650 XT card from PowerColor. Yes, we know, the RX 6650 XT isn't exactly new, but at $199 it's quite a deal considering its strong 1080p performance. Meanwhile, the ASUS ProArt GeForce RTX 4060 OC Edition isn't the cheapest RTX 4060, but it comes with a big triple-fan cooler for whisper-quiet operation and a modest factory overclock.

The next two GPUs on our list are the Sparkle Arc A770 ROC Luna OC Edition and the ASUS Dual Radeon RX 7700 XT. To be clear, these GPUs are really in different performance classes, but they both present great value in their own class. The Arc A770 is a capable 1440p60 or 1080p120 GPU with 16GB of video RAM for big texture budgets. Meanwhile, the Radeon RX 7700 XT offers outstanding raster performance for 1440p or even some 4K games, especially with FSR 3.1 upscaling and frame generation technologies. Both are great values.

Finally, our fastest GPUs today are the XFX Speedster QICK319 Radeon RX 7800 XT and the MSI GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER Ventus 3X Black OC. Just like the previous category, these cards are really in different performance classes, but they're also in entirely different price strata, too. The Radeon RX 7800 XT is enough GPU to handle any current game with maxed-out settings, but if you really want the "PC Gaming Master Race" experience, then you'll want the RTX 4070 Ti SUPER card featuring the Ada Lovelace architecture's accelerated ray-tracing.

You'll need a beefy power supply for your gaming rig, and we've picked a couple of options for you. Basically, if you're buying any of the parts on this page besides the aforementioned RTX 4070 Ti SUPER card, you should grab this discounted Apevia Galaxy power supply with 80+ Gold certification and semi-modular cabling. However, for the big GeForce card, you will want a bit more power as well as a native ATX 3.0 12V-2x6 connection, and the Toughpower GF3 750W unit serves those needs admirably—especially after a 27% discount.

You won't need it with the parts we've picked today, but if you're building a really potent PC, you should consider this Corsair RM1000x Shift fully-modular unit. It's marked down 29% to just $150, which is a fantastic price on a fully-modular 1000W power supply. The RMx Shift series has the modular power connectors shunted to the side of the unit, which makes it much easier to install them in typical PC cases with shrouds.

Lastly, we have the component that is most subject to personal preference: the chassis. Starting with the entry-level Zalman S2 chassis, we have a stylish and high-airflow ATX design that comes with three 120-mm case fans and a lightweight acrylic side panel that gives the look of tempered glass without the heft. If you want something a bit bigger, Corsair's 4000D AIRFLOW chassis is deeply discounted and offers a scratch-resistant glass side panel as well as advanced cable management features and front-panel USB 3.1.

Folks who really want something fancy should instead check out Corsair's dual-chamber 6500X chassis. This case is smaller than it looks; it's relatively short, thanks to the dual-chamber design that puts the power supply behind the motherboard instead of below it. It has a stylish warp-around window and while we didn't select any supported parts today, this chassis also can accommodate back-connect components like MSI's Project Zero parts. It's marked down considerably from its $199.99 MSRP, and makes a great choice for a new build.

All total, our cheapest parts come out to around $750, just a bit more than a PS5 Pro despite coming with double the RAM, more CPU cores, and considerable room for exapnsion. Jumping up to the Radeon RX 7800 XT gives us an equivalent-or-better performance level and still stays under a grand, which isn't bad all things considered. Of course, you can spend a lot more than that on your gaming PC, but it all comes down to what you want out of your system.

What do you think of our parts selections? Let us know in the comments if we missed any awesome Prime Day deals.