The biggest sale event of the year has arrived. Black Friday 2022 promises bargains galore, and though the furore isn’t as dramatic as it has been in years gone by, there are some good deals out there that may save you a few bucks on products you were already planning to buy.
Finding the best bargains, however, is easier said than done. Rather than swarm your inbox with deals willy-nilly, the Club386 team set itself a challenge: what is the best PC we can build for £1,500? Just to make the task that little bit more difficult, we’ve decided that price point also needs to include monitor, keyboard and mouse. Sounds do-able but be wary; you’d be surprised (or perhaps not) at how many products artificially went up in price just days ago, only to be ‘reduced’ specially for Black Friday.
Not to worry, we’ve done the research, checked price histories, cross compared at various retailers, and have come away with a rather well-rounded rig, if we may say so ourselves. Each featured component is at, or close to, the lowest price it has ever been.
Starting with CPU, and following fierce internal debate, the team eventually settled on an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X. Yes, newer, faster processors from both AMD and Intel are now available, but AMD’s eight-core AM4 chip remains an excellent choice, particularly at an all-time-low of £227. It’s a bargain, no doubt, and if you’re adamant you need more threads, the 12-core Ryzen 9 5900X is a close second at £350.
AMD Ryzen 7 5800X
“AMD Ryzen 7 5800X elite gaming desktop processors come with eight cores optimized for high-FPS gaming rigs.”
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Now for the supporting cast. Plenty of parts were considered – speccing a rig is difficult at the best of times, let alone on Black Friday – and for the motherboard we’ve settled on an ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming 4, offering a fully-fledged chipset for under £145. No shortage of choice when it comes to memory – 16GB of Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4-3200 fits the bill at just £53 – and for CPU cooling the MSI MAG Coreliquid P240 offers competent all-in-one liquid cooling for under £75.
Chassis and power supply next. For the former, Corsair’s 4000D Airflow ticks all the right boxes and has dropped back down to £70, representing the best price in over 12 months. Corsair takes the latter spot, too, with the RM750x 80 Plus Gold offering 750 watts of juice at an all-time-low of £90. As for storage, it’s hard to say no to a 1TB Samsung 980 at a Black Friday price of £69.
You aren’t going to find any good deals on RTX 40 Series graphics cards, but there is promise further down the stack. GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is now hovering at or below the £450 mark, yet we’ve given the nod to Radeon RX 6700 XT. Shop around and you can find a 12GB partner card for ~£400.
Such hardware needs a capable ensemble and, in particular, a good monitor. Sieving through the various deals, we’ve stumbled upon the iiyama G-Master GB2730QSU-B1. A TN panel may be a controversial choice, yet at £173 the monitor has never been cheaper, and offers gamers a 2560×1440 QHD resolution at a decent size. Want to truly step it up in the display department? AOC’s excellent Agon AG324UX 4K 144Hz monitor is down to its lowest-ever price, though £650 will put a serious dent in your build budget.
iiyama G-Master GB2730QSU-B1
“The 27” G-Master GB2730QSU known as Silver Crow opens you to a whole new level of gaming experiences.”
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Need a couple of peripherals to go with that? No need to break the bank. Corsair’s K65 RGB Mini keyboard is down to £80, and the accompanying M65 Pro RGB mouse is now available for a mere £38.
Do the math and every component adds up to just under £1,460, leaving enough change for the odd modification here or there. Thoughts on our build? Which parts would you change, and are you opting to buy anything this Black Friday? Let us know on Facebook or Twitter.
