Best early Black Friday desktop gaming PC deals

Technically my job is to report, not to preach, so for anyone wanting a cheap prebuilt games rig this Black Friday season: ta-daaaaaa. It’s a guide to the best early Black Friday deals on desktop gaming PCs!

…Alright, I’m going to preach a little. Buying prebuilt is almost never better than building your own PC; the latter works out cheaper, gives you complete granular control over the components, and is far easier than it looks. Prebuilt desktops will save you an afternoon’s labour but are pricier, often come riddled with bloatware, and can make it harder to upgrade individual parts in the future. Some even use proprietary motherboard form factors, so you can’t ever swap them out.

Still, it’s your call, and if you don’t want to build, you don’t want to build. In that case your best bet is to stick with brands that regularly trade in custom-built PCs, like Overclockers UK or CyberPowerPC in the US. These use off-the-shelf parts, rather than the proprietary hardware you often get in Acer or Alienware prebuilds, so usually avoid any potential upgrade problems or unwanted airflow quirks. And although the big day isn’t until November 25th, a few of these handcrafted gaming PCs are already on Black Friday sales.

You'll find these below, and there are plenty of other early savings to be made in our main Black Friday PC gaming deals hub too. That includes essential peripherals like mice and keyboards, as well as loads of standalone PC components. Just sayin', if you change your mind...

Black Friday desktop gaming PC deals

UK deals:

	Refract Gaming Amber - £930 from Overclockers UK (was £950) This microATX system only has an Intel Core i3 chip, but its 1TB SSD will provide plenty of fast storage, and the RTX 3050 GPU will handle smooth 1080p and even Medium-quality 1440p in most games.
	Scan Gamer RTX - £1000 from Scan (was £1050) A mid-range, mid-tower build with AMD's zippy Ryzen 6 3600 and an 1080p-minded RTX 3060. The 450W power supply is the only weak spot.
	Refract Gaming Jade - £1100 from Overclockers UK (was £1150) The Gaming Jade's RTX 3060 is ideal for high-FPS 1080p, and has some 1440p capability (especially with DLSS). It also has one of the best gaming CPUs of recent years, the Intel Core i5-12400F, and a 1TB SSD.
	Scan 3XS Gamer RTX (Core i5) - £1600 from Scan (was £1750) That's £150 off this high-specced RTX 3070 system, which also includes a bang-up-to-date Intel Core i5-13600K and 1TB of NVMe SSD storage.
	Scan 3XS Gamer RTX (Core i7) - £1650 from Scan (was £1800) This PC sticks with the last-gen Intel Core i7-12700, but unlike the other Scan-built RTX 3070 system above, has a full-sized ATX motherboard, leaving much more room for potential hardware upgrades.
	Scan 3XS Vengeance Ti - £3700 from Scan (was £4500) With an RTX 3090 Ti, watercooled Intel Core i9-13900K, 32GB of DDR5 memory and a 2TB NVMe SSD, this 4K-ready desktop spares no expense. Except, y'know, the £800 discount.

US deals:

	CyberPowerPC Gamer Supreme (RX 6700 XT) - $1000 from Best Buy (was $1400) All of CyberPowerPC's best Black Friday deals, counterintuitively, aren't on their own site. Best Buy has $400 off this Radeon RX 6700 XT-based rig, which will happily run High-level settings at 1440p.
	iBuyPower Trace MR (RTX 3060) - $1100 from Best Buy (was $1200) Not bad money at all for an RTX 3060, 16GB of RAM and nearly 1.5TB of total storage space. The CyberPowerPC Gamer Supreme above is better value overall, though.
	CyberPowerPC Gamer Xtreme - $1180 from Best Buy (was $1300) Fast 1440p is well within grasp of the Gamer Xtreme, thanks to its DLSS-capable RTX 3060 Ti and Core i7-12700F chip.
	iBuyPower Trace MR (RTX 3070) - $1300 from Best Buy (was $1400) You won't find many prebuilt RTX 3070 desktop PCs as cheap as this. There are some compromises, like the older 11th Gen Intel CPU, but you're still getting a 4K/ultrawide-ready rig with SSD storage and a perfectly sufficient 16GB of RAM.
	CyberPowerPC Gamer Supreme (RTX 3080) - $1750 from Best Buy (was $1950) A true 4K gaming PC. The horsepower comes from an RTX 3080 graphics card and Ryzen 9 5900X CPU, and you get liquid cooling and a spacious 1TB SSD to sweeten the deal.