This story is part of Holiday Gift Guide 2021, our list of ideas, by topic, by recipient and by price, to help you discover the perfect gift.
Even if you can find a stand-alone Nvidia GeForce RTX 3000-series graphics card in stock, you’ll likely encounter an elevated price that’ll make you gasp. A better route might be a prebuilt PC. You can find some reasonably priced, off-the-shelf gaming desktops right now with Nvidia’s latest GPUs. There are even a few discounts to be found — a rare occurrence for anything related to Nvidia’s RTX GPUs.
Best Buy and Newegg have some inventory of RTX 30-series gaming desktops from vendors including ABS, Cyberpower, HP, Lenovo and Skytech. After taking a look at the PCs that each site has in stock, here are the best deals I found — from relatively inexpensive desktops with RTX 3060 graphics to a fully loaded beast with an RTX 3090 GPU.
Read more: Best graphics card for gamers and creatives in 2021
Check back — I’ll keep this list updated as I find new deals on RTX 30-series gaming desktops.
Lenovo
This is one of the lowest-cost PCs I can find with RTX 30-series graphics. It features GeForce RTX 3060 graphics along with AMD’s octa-core Ryzen 7 5700G CPU, 16GB of RAM and a pair of storage drives — a 512GB solid-state drive and a 1TB hard drive. The case is air-cooled and features RGB lighting, an illuminated logo and a 650-watt power supply.
HP
This HP system is another gaming system powered by an AMD and Nvidia combo, in this case an octa-core Ryzen 7 5800X CPU and GeForce RTX 3060 Ti graphics. The imposing, jet-black tower also includes 16GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD and a 750-watt power supply.
Newegg
Sensing a pattern? The best pairing for gamers right now is an octa-core CPU from AMD and GeForce RTX 30-series graphics. This CyberpowerPC system follows that recipe with a Ryzen 7 5800X and RTX 3060 Ti graphics. It also features 16GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD and a beefy 800-watt PSU.
Newegg
This Skytech tower pairs an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X CPU with RTX 3070 graphics and also serves up 16GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD and a 750-watt PSU. The mesh front panel and side panel allow the interior RGB lighting to shine through for a bit of bling.
Newegg
This ABS PC pairs an Intel Core i9 CPU with GeForce RTX 3080 graphics. You also get 16GB of RAM and a roomy 1TB SSD. The 850-watt PSU provides plenty of overhead for future upgrades. It’s currently discounted by $300 at Newegg.
HP
Ready to blow it out? When you consider that many gaming PCs with Nvidia’s latest GPUs cost $5,000 and up, this HP Omen looks reasonable for $4,000. It features the GeForce RTX 3090, the top GPU in Nvidia’s new lineup. It also boasts an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X CPU, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD, plus a 2TB hard drive. It also offers an 800-watt power supply and a liquid-cooling system.