Black Friday is right around the corner but the deals have started early. Retailers have already begun offering killer discounts on everything from home-office PCs to decked-out gaming rigs and sleek all-in-ones. Still, not all computer deals are built the same.
When shopping for a new desktop PC, it’s important to know what deal is actually a great value. To help, we’ve curated the top Black Friday computer deals leading up to, and during the biggest sales event of the year to help you get the best performance for your money.
The Skytech Chronos that’s $150 off on Amazon is a solid early Black Friday deal for a budget gaming PC. With a Core i5-12400F CPU and RTX 4060 GPU, you’ll get excellent frame rates while gaming at 1080p with the latest AAA games.
But then there’s also Dell, who kicked off Black Friday with a pair of excellent deals on its Alienware Aurora R16 gaming desktop models. The first is a strong mid-range build for $600 off and the second is a higher-end build that’s $1,000 off. Both deals offer very affordable prices for their respective specs, but if I had the cash, the tricked-out build with a Core i9-14900KF CPU and RTX 4090 GPU would be hard to pass up.
Lenovo is offering the IdeaCentre Mini for $140 off on its website during its early Black Friday sale. This mini PC, with an impressively small footprint and great productivity features, is a must-have if desktop space is in short supply and you don’t want to sacrifice performance.
Mac fans need not miss out either, as there’s a rare deal on the M2 Mac Mini for $100 off on Amazon. The M2 is still a solid CPU, and considering that the M4 Mac Mini was just announced, it’s the perfect time to buy the older version at a discount. You’re still getting a capable mini desktop, but without the exorbitant price of a new-gen Apple product.
I really like the Dell Inspiron 24 AiO deal for $200 off on Dell’s website. It might not look like the most mind-blowing AiO, but don’t let that fool you. Good performance features and a handy touch display make this a stand-out all-in-one Black Friday sale.
Alternatively, the big beautiful HP Envy AiO 34 is on sale for $470 off on HP’s website. This top of the line all-in-one is not only loaded with strong performance features, but the 34-inch 5K ultrawide display is drop-dead gorgeous. Plus, HP even throws in an RTX 3050 discrete graphics card just in case you want to do some gaming on the side as well.
Yes, Black Friday is a great time to score a great deal on solid PC. But make no mistake, some retailers do tag some consumer items as Black Friday deals, when in fact the price decreases are really just typical sale prices. At PCWorld, we do our best to only highlight deals that meet two criteria: The product itself is something we’d happily buy ourselves, and the product’s price has reached or fallen below its historical all-time-low price.
You’ll see a dizzying array of deals when searching for a desktop computer on Black Friday, but they won’t all be good values. When looking at your new computer’s CPU, get at least an Intel Core i5 or AMD Ryzen 5. Either will provide plenty of processing power for everyday computing tasks.
If you don’t intend to do any PC gaming, then feel free to save some money by going with integrated graphics. However, if you are looking to get your game on, we recommend a minimum of an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 or AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT, as these are the least expensive discrete graphics cards that can handle ray-tracing settings. If you want the latest and greatest, then you should opt for one of Nvidia’s newer line of GPUs (RTX 4060, 4070, 4080, or 4090). These will be more expensive, but they will give you top of the line performance—particularly the RTX 4080 and 4090 cards.
As for RAM, shoot for a minimum of 16GB for gaming and ideally 32GB for content creation if you plan to do things such as video editing and rendering tasks. But for general-purpose internet browsing and regular office tasks, 8GB of RAM can suffice.
Storage size is dependent upon your personal needs, but it’s generally a good idea to opt for an SSD over a standard HDD as they are much faster and don’t significantly affect the price of a desktop PC. A good starting place for most desktop PCs will be 512GB of storage, but for those who have large files to store (such as videos or games) then you should go for something over 1TB.
Additionally, if you intend to go for an all-in-one with an integrated display, look for a screen with a minimum resolution of 1080p.
There are a ton of sites that sell computers on Black Friday, and scouring through all of them would take you a lot of time—that’s why we do it for you here and highlight the best deals we find. However, to save you some time and frustration, you need to be smart about where you look at any given time of the year.
During holiday shopping times like Black Friday, you’re best bet is to check first-party vendor websites. These include the retail storefronts of popular computer manufacturers such as HP, Dell, and Lenovo.
However, if you can’t find anything you like there, then you can expand your search to large third-party retailers such as Amazon, Adorama, Walmart, BestBuy, and Newegg. Oftentimes these websites will offer limited Deals of the Day of Flash Deal type sales in hopes of getting rid of excess stock. On the upside, you can score still-decent PCs at a steep discount if you time it right.
Black Friday 2024 falls on Friday, Nov 29. However, many retailers have already started to offer great discounts on desktop computers. Keep your eyes tuned to PCWorld for the best desktop PC deal alerts. We’ll be covering discounts now through November and on to Cyber Monday, Dec 2.
