by Let’s face it no matter how many times you scour the Black Friday graphics card deals (opens in new tab) list you will not suddenly find an Nvidia RTX 4090 (opens in new tab) there with some form of discount. Hell, you should be lucky enough to find one in stock and sell for something like the original MSRP.
But surprisingly, there are Black Friday gaming PCs (opens in new tab) with built-in RTX 40 series graphics cards going on sale with actual discounts. Sure, GPU prices being what it is, these systems are in the ~$3,000 range, but then at least you’re looking at packing a modern Ada Lovelace graphics card somewhere similar to the ‘regular’ MSRP.
The iBuyPower system up top is actually cheaper than some of the RTX 4090 cards we’ve seen on sale at Newegg. Those prices are ridiculous, and if someone pays even $2,000 for a GPU, you won’t get any sympathy from me. But even at the $1,600 MSRP, you’re talking about half the price of the full build.
In addition, you get arguably the best gaming CPU on the market today, the Intel Core i9 13900K (opens in new tab) and a free upgrade to 32 GB DDR5-6000. While it must be said I’m not 100% sure how “free” the upgrade is, but still it’s very, very fast memory.
However, the problem I have with this rig is that SSD. While a 2TB PCIe drive of any kind will provide a healthy amount of fast storage, the Samsung 970 EVO is an old drive these days, and for this kind of money you might hope for a PCIe 4.0 SSD. But if that’s the compromise you have to make, then it’s okay.
A word about lead times, though. The iBuyPower machine lists an estimated shipment date of December 15 at the time of writing, though it does add an extra week due to demand for the new GPUs. Those GPUs also ship uninstalled, so you’ll have to do the hooking up yourself.
That’s actually the preferred option, if you ask me. These are huge chunks of silicon and aluminum heat sinks, and you don’t want them coming loose in transit and destroying the rest of your new setup. It does provide PDF instructions on how to do it, but really it’s just a matter of plugging it in and screwing it on.
If that’s still too rich for your blood, we’ve got the RTX 4080 based options. Now, at its list price, we’re hard-pressed to recommend the Nvidia RTX 4080 (opens in new tab) as a worthy card in its own right, but there are systems offered for much less than RTX 3090 based machines that it will easily beat in an outright gaming frame rate race.
CyberPowerPC is now presenting the Gamer Infinity XLC at a $500 discount. That’s just a few hundred bucks under the iBuyPower system with the RTX 4090 in it. That’s a significantly better card, so if you can spare the extra $200 or so, that would be my recommendation.
If you’re on a strict $3,000 budget (thank goodness, anyway), this gorgeous-looking system will still serve you well. There is no particular weakness in the build and the delivery expectation is set for December 12. There will always be the fear that with the high demand for these cards that could shift, but at least CyberPowerPC guarantees delivery “before Christmas or sooner.”
