If you’re a canny planner, you’ve been holding out for all the best Black Friday PC deals to scoop up the components you need for your new PC build or upgrade. Mad props to you for that, you clever shopper. Now that the deals are flooding in, it’s time to pick and choose, and to save you a whole lot of time and, well, money, I’ve gone ahead and found some particularly choice offers you can use to assemble your new battle station.
These are the essential bits you’ll be needing regardless of which CPU, motherboard or graphics card you’re basing your build around. Whether you’re building from scratch, or just upgrading a component here or there, these are the deals I’ve found that can make that happen for less.
PSU
This Thermaltake Smart WS 700W is going for a nutty AU$71.20 right now. It’s ATX 3.1-compatible, though isn’t modular. Who cares? We’re after power and savings, not beauty.
If you need a little more juice, Corsair’s RM850x is a great choice. Our mates over on Tom’s Hardware praised it in their review, saying “Corsair managed to improve the already great RM850x, offering even higher performance and a magnetic levitation fan.” It’s sitting on a 24% discount right now.
AIO CPU cooler
A 240mm AIO ought to do the job for most builds that aren’t aggressively overclocked, and Corsair’s Nautilus 240 RS offers good cooling and it’s pretty quiet. It’s AU$97 on Amazon at the moment, which is nice for this quality brand.
If you are running a hotter CPU and want to get the maximum from it, and need a 360mm AIO, we found this Thermalright FW360 for just AU$90. That’s even cheaper than the Corsair above! The reviews on Amazon sit at 4.5/5 for this one (we haven’t reviewed it ourselves), and you can have black or white, though the White is AU$116.90, which is still good value.
RAM
Well, this is the hot potato in the room. As the Great Memory Apocalypse gets worse day by day, finding affordable yet decent memory is an uphill battle. Here’s some, in a rare find for a Corsair Vengeance 32GB 6400MHz DDR5 kit that’s actually well priced in the first place, is from a good brand and even has the RGB sparkles. This is not one to wait long on.
SSD
This is a component that’s hard to find discounted at the moment, as the data centres of evil snap up new stock. But sitting quietly in a corner of the internet, waiting to be added to a loving cart, is this Orico 2TB Gen4 drive. TechRadar rate it at 4.5 stars out of 5. So AU$209.09 for 2TB is pretty sweet and it’ll probably be all the storage you need in your new PC.
Case
Corsair is going hard with the Black Friday deals, and the 3500X is 26% off for Black Friday. It’s a pretty standard case that’s easy to build in and comes with a set of three 120mm RGB fans pre-installed. Tom’s reckons it’s a very nice design, and only complained about the price. Well it’s on sale now so that just leaves the good news.
Fans
Whatever case you buy, you will need a few more fans for the top and rear, most likely, and again it’s Corsair with the deal. This three-pack of 120mm ARGB fans is down to AU$53. They can be daisy chained and offer very good performance without being too loud thanks to the magnetic dome bearing fans, something Corsair’s particularly good at.