Cyber Monday deals live – like a real human boy I’m bringing you the best laptop, PC, GPU, and general gaming tech deals around

My current PC audio setup has an MXL 990 condenser mic and a set of DT 770 Pro headphones running through an old Native Instruments USB audio interface, and it’s nice to have all that when I’m LARPing as a musician, but the reality is that I mostly use my gear for attending meetings, which does not really require such a fiddly setup.

I’ve been thinking of switching to a regular old gaming headset to simplify my life, and I’m not sure the Kitty V3 Pro suits my style, but it would be funny for at least one meeting. This headset isn’t on our list of the best gaming headsets, though Razer’s BlackShark V3 did make the list, and, importantly, this one has kitty ears.

If you haven’t played wonderful roguelike Caves of Qud, I’d recommend fixing that with haste—especially if you got yourself a high refresh 4K OLED monitor for Cyber Monday. (That’s a little joke for Qud knowers). Even if you’ve never spent a minute with the game, though, I think you might see the appeal in these art prints from the official shop, which reimagine it in the form of pulp sci-fi novel covers. This is exactly my aesthetic and I’m obsessed with them. They’re 25% off when purchased individually, while the whole shop’s 10% off in general. That’s the only discount you get if you buy the four print bundle, but it’s still somethin’!

There are some cool t-shirt, totes, and stickers, too, as well as merch for a couple other games including Peak and Furi.

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For around $1,500 you’re looking at what I would call the sweet spot for a new prebuilt gaming PC. Around $1,000 is usually more ‘budget’ territory (I know, I know), but that extra $500 can make a huge difference to the spec that you walk away with.

That’s obvious when you look at this stellar iBuyPower machine, which is just $1,549 at iBuyPower right now. It’s a good-looking system, comes with an AMD 3D V-Cache processor of the Zen 4 generation—one that was our favorite gaming CPU for a loooong time—and has the best graphics card AMD has produced in many a year. That RX 9070 XT is a fantastic GPU, and is only likely to get better as AMD gets FSR4 in more places with its smarter upscaling and its Redstone tech finally launches.

You’re also getting 32 GB of DDR5-6000 memory—which in new RAM money translates to a $300+ kit—and a healthy 2 TB SSD, too. Both of those components are going to be even more impacted by price rises as we get into the end of the year and beyond.

Check out the pretty printed Higround keyboards and mouse mats still on offer in the Black Friday/Cyber Monday sale. If you’re a Halo or an Apex Legends fan, these might be the keebs for you.

If you can’t quite bring yourself to go so far down the rabbit hole as to start collecting little posable Space Marine figures (and congratulations on your self-restraint) then how about settling down with a good book and getting into the grimdark lore of Warhammer 40,000?

Or if not print, how about an audiobook instead?

They’re both very similar builds, where the main difference is their respective CPUs. The Alienware is $1,900 at Dell today, and is rocking an Intel Arrow Lake chip, the Core Ultra 7 265F. That’s a 20-core, 20-thread CPU (eight Performance and 12 Efficient cores) with okay gaming performance. The iBuyPower is $1,950 at Best Buy and packs an AMD Ryzen 9 7900X CPU of the Zen 4 generation, with 12-full cores and 24-threads of processing grunt.

Then it’s just down to the PSU. The Alienware has a 1000 W supply, while the iBuyPower just an 850 W PSU.

Outside of the spec it probably comes down to whether you are likely to want to do a big PC upgrade down the line. If that’s your bag, the iBuyPower machine is using standard, off-the-shelf ATX PC parts and will be easily upgradeable with other, newer parts later on. The Alienware, however, uses a non-standard motherboard and PSU, making full platform reconfigurations kinda off the table.

But you picks your poison and takes your medicine. Which is a phrase I’m not entirely sure is in common use. Or even exists. Happy Cyber Monday, y’all.

I am not a fully formed adult, despite my rapidly advancing years, and so, when Robin brought the Joytoy Warhammer 40K figures to my attention it’s taken all my willpower not to add to my burgeoning ‘adult’ Lego collection with some ‘adult’ dolls. Okay, that reads a lot weirder now I type that out.

Anyways, I want to spend money on a Terminator model like this dude ☝️or a Space Marine like this dude 👇 and there’s no one around to stop me. Curse those Cyber Monday Walmart deals…

In the real world, I’m a bit of a skinflint. I struggle to spend money on myself—two small children and a crippling mortgage will do that to a guy—which means I would really struggle to pay the small fortune that really good graphics cards cost in this generation. While I might love to have an RX 9070 slapped in my home PC, and compared to what it was costing earlier in the year $520 isn’t that bad, it’s still more than I could pay in good conscience.

What I could pay, however, would be the $350 Amazon is charging for the RX 9060 XT 16 GB. Now, I know that’s effectively its original MSRP, but with the looming memory apocalypse threatening to spike GPU prices again—especially for graphics cards laden with this much VRAM—it’s a good price for a really solid gaming GPU.

I probably should have just guessed what actually happened, that the inexorable rise of modern AI would have lead to a massive run on memory, spiking the price beyond all reason. As I think about it now, that should have been obvious.

But it’s kinda snuck up on us, and all of a sudden a 64 GB DDR5 kit costs at least $620 at Newegg right now. Compare that with this full Acer Nitro V 16 gaming laptop for just $629 at Walmart and things look frankly ludicrous.

I’m with Jacob on this, this iFixit bundle makes for the best PC building toolkit around, and not just for PC building either. I’ve used the suckers to help get ants out of my TV (for reals) and the spudgers for spudging my small children. They love it.

I’ve had mine for years and it’s been a constant companion and assistant and is absolutely worth the current deal price of $60 at Amazon.

I’ve been using the same old 1 TB Samsung T3 external SSD since I first reviewed it back in 2016. It’s been my go-to review drive for transferring and running gaming benchmarks on laptops and PCs ever since and has been nothing short of utterly reliable. Now, you’re not going to find any Cyber Monday SSD deals on this old thing, but the far quicker, far newer Samsung T9 is on sale for $95 at Amazon today.

It’s not the cheapest 1 TB external drive on sale at the moment—our pick for that would be the $89 Team Group PD20M. But the Samsung series have always been robust wee things, and that’s why I’d put my money towards the T9 instead.

It’s not quite the $133 1440p screen that Black Friday offered up, but still being able to buy a 180 Hz 1440p gaming monitor for just $150 at Amazon is pretty stunning. What’s more, it’s sporting an impressively quick IPS panel, while with the previous cheaper deal you had to make do with a VA display.

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You always need batteries around the holidays, right? More so if you plump for the Quest 3S deal below. You’re getting better-than-Quest-2 virtual reality, with excellent PCVR chops, for a bargain price. Sure, it’s Meta, and that sucks, but until the Steam Frame comes around next year, this is what VR people are stuck with, okay?

For just $249 at Newegg it’s probably not going to go far to plug the multi billion dollar hole Zuck’s made in Meta’s finances with his metaverse shenanigans, so there’s that at least.

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While some things are getting ludicrously expensive right now (memory, I’m looking at you) it still blows my mind that some things are so damned cheap. For one, we have the excellent Amazon Basics USB Condenser Mic. If you just want a wee mic to sit on your desk and make you sound better than 90% of all headset mics, then this is all you need to spend.

For just under $22 at Amazon this is a gem of a microphone, and means you don’t have to go with a gaming headset to keep in touch with your buddies on chat. You can now have a set of lovely headphones instead.

Looming over all that, however, is the memory pricing apocalypse^TM, which is spiking the prices of absolutely everything even closely related to memory right now. And yes, that will include graphics cards because, while VRAM isn’t the thing in demand, memory manufacturing is going to be pointing more and more at DRAM, leading to shortages elsewhere.

And that also means those promises of VRAM-laden RTXX 50-series Super cards are unlikely to bear fruit until well into next year… if at all.

So where does the smart money go right now? Honestly, it’s probably a toss up between these two GPUs👇 The specs are similar and so are the prices, but in general I’d probably be siding with the RX 9070 for the extra standard gaming frame rates, though having spent a lot of time messing with MFG that does still offer some temptation.

But not enough though; in this fight I’m on AMD’s side.

Okay, while not strictly a Cyber Monday thing, it was still today I learned the Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive is routinely saving nearly 150 terabytes, or hundreds of millions worth of web pages every day. And it has recently celebrated logging its trillionth page.

Apparently a single copy of the Internet Archive library itself takes up over 175 petabytes of server space, “and we store at least 2 copies of everything,” says the Internet Archive’s about page.

So… er… they’re going to need more storage? Cue shameless deal plug 👇

But then there’s Alienware…

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Though there is also Alienware, which has unexpectedly turned out to be the manufacturer with the outright cheapest RTX 5080 gaming PC we’ve ever seen. The Aurora may not be super upgradeable (curse that bespoke motherboard) but at $1,900 from Dell, it’s a fantastic deal on a surprisingly well-rounded spec.