I built the best gaming PC I could for under $1200 using Black Friday deals, and now I actually want it
My favorite November tradition, other than eating myself into a turkey and pie coma, is seeing what kind of rig I can build using nothing but the best Black Friday PC gaming deals. I scour every retailer for the best prices on the best parts, looking for every opportunity to save a few bucks while still buying quality PC components. The trickiest thing about Black Friday shopping is just how much junk there is to wade through—there are dozens of sticks of RAM on sale for close to the same price, but dig into the specs and you’ll see differences in speed and latency hiding behind that “Black Friday deal” badge.
This year I gave myself a budget of $1,200 (pre-tax) to build a gaming PC that would normally cost $288 more. Once these Black Friday deals disappear, this PC build will run closer to $1,500.
This is a PC I’d happily build for myself, with no cut corners. At its heart are the non-overclocking version of our favorite gaming CPU, the Intel Core i5-13600KF, and an incredibly reasonably priced Radeon RX 6800 with 16GB of GDDR6. We’ve also got some fast DDR5 RAM, a 2TB PCIe Gen 4 SSD, and an all-in-one liquid cooler that’ll help that CPU stay cool.
Quick links: Black Friday PC build under $1200
Total cost: $1,163.74
The Core i5-13600KF can handle any current game you can throw at it and will be a strong gaming GPU for years to come, while the Radeon RX 6800’s ample VRAM will help a bit with the #stutterstruggle that’s afflicted so many PC games this year. AMD’s cards still aren’t fantastic at ray tracing, but this is still otherwise an absolute beastly 1440p graphics card. In our review, it delivered an average 75 fps in Total War: Three Kingdoms, 128 fps in Shadow of the Tomb Raider and 92 fps in Metro Exodus, all on Ultra settings.
I made sure to pick parts that would all fit in the selected case, so there shouldn’t be any rude surprises when you go to put it all together. If you’re feeling the itch to start the year with a new PC, it’s going to be hard to beat the price/performance of these deals.
Also, it has a Sonic the Hedgehog motherboard with built-in Wi-Fi 6E and a 2.5 Gbps Ethernet port. I set out to make a PC that would go fast, but I didn’t expect this would be how I got there.
Full component list: Black Friday PC build under $1200
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