Black Friday sales do not result in shortages of entire gaming PCs. In fact, even when GPUs were in short supply, one could find gaming PCs available for shipment with relatively short delivery times. These shortages have now all but disappeared, and Black Friday gaming PC sales (open in new tab) are appearing like mushrooms on a rainy day.

With so many gaming PC deals out there right now, you need to be extra careful about what is actually good and what is not worth the money: a $699.99 gaming PC on sale on Amazon is a good thing, but a GTX 1650 Super with 8GB of single-channel RAM, you can do better.

So be critical about the gaming PCs currently on the market and look for a gaming PC that doesn't sacrifice a great deal for affordability.

What you're looking for:

What you want to avoid:

These requirements may seem stringent, but I think these are the specs that will look best for PC gaming on a budget in 2022 There is no reason not to expect specs under $1,000. In fact, most are under $900.

In my search for Black Friday gaming PC deals, what surprised me most was how little I found on Amazon. There were so many overpriced machines with older spec CPUs and RTX 20-series or GTX 16-series GPUs. Don't be fooled by these kinds of "deals."

GPU shipments are reported to be down historically (open in new tab); you can and should get an RTX 30 series or RX 6000 series graphics card before the affordable next generation GPUs from Nvidia or AMD.

The same goes for CPUs, with Intel's 12th and 13th generations and AMD's Ryzen 5000 and 7000 series continuing to bring in great CPU generations.