All this week, up to Sunday 28th May, is Gaming Week at Amazon. And that means discounts on all kinds of gaming goodies, from the best gaming headsets, to gaming laptops, SSDs, peripherals, and even gaming PCs.
And graphics cards. But please don't buy one, the discounts don't make what Amazon is offering any more tempting.
Honestly Amazon is very rarely the best place to buy a graphics card, more so since the supply chain and GPU mining crises. You will often find better offers elsewhere and you're also more likely to find old graphics cards being sold for ridiculously high prices within the often murky realms of its sellers.
But it doesn't just have to be unscrupulous GPU sellers you need to be careful of as Amazon's own Gaming Week graphics card deals are well worth avoiding. They're mostly the result of an overstock of last-gen cards, and they're being discounted to a price that is more or less the price of the new cards either launching this week or in July.
I mean, in Amazon's defence that over-priced RTX 3060 is in fancy white trim, so maybe that's worth the premium and the lower actual in-game performance to you. If so, well, knock yourself out, it's your moolah to waste.
In similar white trim, there's an RTX 3060 Ti on sale for $430 right now. And that's just $30 more expensive than the explicitly faster RTX 4060 Ti which launches tomorrow. Now, I've not been super glowing in my review of that card, but it's still the one I'd buy for ~$400 right now.
But there are GPU bargains to be had out there, such as this Intel Arc A750 that's just under $200 at Newegg. The first Intel graphics cards have had a tough start in life, but with regular driver improvements they've just been getting better and better. That's a GPU which is often competitive with the RTX 3060 in gaming terms, and is now over $100 cheaper.
There are also some good non-GPU deals out there, such as one of the best wireless gaming headset around today, the Razer BlackShark V2 Pro for just $129. It's got a solid battery life, reliable connection, on-ear controls, and dual-chamber drivers which sound great in-game or listening to music.
There's also the best AMD gaming CPU you can stick into an existing AM4 gaming PC. Basically, if you've got an existing Ryzen-based PC, the chances are that you could drop the Ryzen 7 5800X3D into your motherboard and have the fastest CPU option available to you for $219. It's never dropped below this price before in its lifetime.
Amazon even has a cheap gaming PC deal that's not bad, with an HP Pavillion desktop machine, with an RTX 3060 inside it going for $700.
Elsewhere it's arguably tougher to find a great deal, but it's worth having a look at the full PC Gaming Week sale. Just remember, a lot of this sale is about off-loading last generation hardware, but not necessarily for a bargain price. Don't be fooled by big red discount percentage numbers. Have a look for equivalent, modern systems and see how close in price those are to these discounts.
And remember, CamelCamelCamel is your friend when it comes to tracking historic pricing, too.